On the day Oona O’Neill was born, May 14, 1925, Kenneth Macgowan received a tongue-in-cheek notification: “It’s a goil. Allah be merciful. According to indications will be first lady announcer at Polo Grounds. Predict great future grand opera. Agnes and baby all serene.”177 Macgowan sailed to Bermuda with Jones early that June, and O’Neill met them at the gangplank. After a swim at the beach below Southcote, O’Neill read them the opening scenes of The Great God Brown, noting in his diary that both were “much impressed.”178 When Macgowan and Jones sailed for New York a week later with a typed copy of the script in hand, O’Neill felt emboldened, if only for a few days, to begin the scenario for an even grander departure. He’d first come up with an idea in 1923 of a woman obsessing over the loss of her husband, an aviator in World War I. At the time, O’Neill called it “Godfather,” but then gave it a new title, Strange Interlude.179
On June 29, the O’Neills sailed back to New York on the Fort St. George, a contraband copy of James for obscenity, Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which had been banned in the United States for obscenity, buried deep in their luggage. Boulton then took Oona, Shane, and Gaga for the summer to the resort island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts; “Peaked Hill,” Boulton wrote Harold de Polo, “is a little too primitive for the baby.”180 O’Neill stayed behind in New York at the Hotel Lafayette for a month of hobnobbing and hard drinking with friends and theater associates.
Paul Robeson, well aware of O’Neill’s taste for hot jazz, invited the playwright up to Harlem to swill liquor and take in the speakeasies with him and Experimental Theatre, Inc., member Harold McGee. It was the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and Robeson and McGee were in a celebratory mood. They were heading off that August for the London revival of The Emperor Jones with Robeson playing Jones, McGee managing the stage, and Jimmy Light directing. They caroused the Harlem clubs all night, and O’Neill wouldn’t climb into bed at the Lafayette until ten a.m. Head pounding with a hangover, he noted in his diary, “Up all night. Disaster.”181 (A couple of months later, O’Neill received something of a consolation prize, if one needs such a thing after clubbing in Harlem with Paul Robeson in 1925: Jimmy Light cabled from London on September 11 that The Emperor Jones was a “big hit.”)182
O’Neill reunited with his family in Nantucket that August for a month of ostensible reform. After a week in the modest clapboard cottage at 5 Mill Street, his diary reads, “On the wagon,” then a few days of nothing until, “Off! But not serious.”183 He’d found it impossible to work in New York, but Nantucket wasn’t much better. Ed Keefe arrived from New London only to discover that Boulton had no idea where her husband was. Keefe eventually hunted him down and brought him to a friend’s schooner where they sat up drinking all night. Keefe fell asleep but was startled awake by a sailor shouting that a man had fallen overboard. They fished O’Neill out of the harbor, drenched and flailing helplessly. After he’d slept it off, Boulton arrived in a rowboat and paddled him home.184 Despite such relapses, O’Neill was able to revise The Fountain, which he’d started in 1922, and expand his scenario for Strange Interlude.
On his way back to New York in early October, O’Neill took off on another “bust” during a stopover in New London. He’d first looked in on Monte Cristo Cottage, sorrowfully describing the scene: “Decay + ruin—sad.”185 Wanting to get drunk, he met up with Art McGinley’s brother Tom, Ed Keefe, Doc Ganey, “and the rest of the corrupt herd” for lunch at the Thames Club on State Street. It was a reunion of sorts of the old Second Story Club, and from there they “embarked on a debauch” through the night, “everyone blotto,” that wrapped up at Doc Ganey’s, where O’Neill passed out cold. (“They are much too swift for me in New London these days,” he joked to Art McGinley a couple of years later. “I am glad to have moved to a clime [Bermuda] where they take things easier.”)186 “You know,” O’Neill told Doc Ganey before losing consciousness, “I always wanted to make money. My motive was to be able, someday, to hire a tally-ho and fill it full of painted whores, load each whore with a bushel of dimes and let them throw the money to the rabble on a Saturday afternoon; we’d ride down State Street and toss money to people like the Chappells. Now that I’ve made as much as I need, I’ve lost interest.”187
O’Neill temporarily placed Strange Interlude on the shelf that autumn at Brook Farm. Instead, he worked on a new play, Lazarus Laughed, and cleaned up The Fountain for its mid-December premiere. He drank heavily on the nights when he attended rehearsals for The Fountain in New York. By then, he’d become sickened by the play, by the whole business of playwriting, in fact. On the night of November 23, 1925, he drowned his misery on yet another “bust,” this time with Mary Blair and her husband, Edmund Wilson. The Experimental Theatre, Inc., had produced Wilson’s play The Crime in the Whistler Room the previous season as a favor to Blair, who starred in it; after that O’Neill didn’t encourage “Bunny,” as the literary critic was known, to go any further with playwriting. Wilson could be critical of O’Neill’s work too, even if his wife was then considered “the O’Neill actress,” but he still admired his talent for “drawing music from humble people.”188
O’Neill stayed on at their place until four a.m., emptying the apartment of Scotch and rambling on about topics ranging from the plays of Sophocles to the louche behavior of the actresses of his father’s generation to the homosexual tendencies of sailors. “O’Neill had a peculiar point of view on the homosexual activities of the sailors he’d known on shipboard,” Wilson recalled of their conversation that night: “He thought that in degrading themselves by submitting to the demands of other sailors, they were always trying to atone for some wrong which was on their conscience.” (At the time, in fact, O’Neill was planning to write a play about what he’d witnessed firsthand of sailors’ homosexual relations during his time with the merchant marine, but only have it printed for private consumption; as far as is known, he abandoned the idea.)189
The next day, dog-tired and profoundly hungover, O’Neill stumbled into the Greenwich Village Theatre for yet another dismal Fountain rehearsal. This time, he left so “disgusted” that he traveled uptown to commiserate with Jimmy Light at his flat on East Seventy-Eighth Street.190 Light was then designing the masks for The Great God Brown production at the Greenwich Village Theatre while at the same time trying to keep the Provincetown Playhouse afloat with Fitzie Fitzgerald. (The Triumvirate had found it too unwieldy to run two theaters at once, so they’d gratefully handed over the reins to their colleagues.)
Light welcomed O’Neill into his home that afternoon, he remembered, as “a friend with whom he could say what he wanted and needed to say.”191 O’Neill hadn’t written a word in nearly two weeks, and he made a startling admission: after striving as a dramatist for more than a decade, he was through. He would become a novelist. “Crowding a drama into a play,” he told Light, “is like getting an elephant to dance in a tub.”192 The analogy must have brought to Light’s mind the time when Walter Huston was overacting as Ephraim Cabot at rehearsals for Desire Under the Elms; O’Neill had, with his typical breviloquence, instructed the seasoned performer, “Walter, don’t help the elephant to walk.”193 (This metaphor would also come back to taunt O’Neill when the writer Mary McCarthy, in her devastating takedown of The Iceman Cometh, compared him with other contemporary American writers such as Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, whose works “can find no reason for stopping, but go on and on, like elephants pacing in a zoo.”)194
O’Neill’s dissatisfaction with drama wasn’t news to Light. He’d generally written his plays to be read like novels anyway; how they’d appear in print was oftentimes more important to him than how they’d appear in front of the footlight. But his determination to write novels instead of plays was news, and it raised questions about why he wished to and how it would affect his writing in the years to come. Of course, he’d already tried to blend drama and fiction with Beyond the Horizon and Chris: the latter, O’Neill said just after its production, “was a
special play, a technical experiment by which I tried to compress the theme for a novel into play form without losing the flavor of the novel. The attempt failed.” And while writing Beyond the Horizon, he said, “I dreamed of wedding the theme for a novel to the play form in a way that would still leave the play master of the house. I still dream of it.” O’Neill wondered at the time if “such a bastard form deserved to fail,” whether he’d been “attempting the impossible.”195 Light transcribed this conversation as an addendum to his unpublished essay “The Parade of Masks,” a previously unknown document that illuminates O’Neill’s otherwise shadowed motives for abandoning plays; it is, therefore, invaluable for understanding nearly all his work from The Great God Brown onward.196
Not one of his plays up to then, he told Light, had given him any real sense of satisfaction by the time it went into production. “When I first have the idea,” he said, “it is a blazing fire. When I have written it, it is glowing coals. When it is rehearsed and acted, it is warm embers. When an audience sees it, it is ashes.”197 Gone were the days of the Greeks, of Shakespeare, of the romanticists. The dramatist’s job now was merely “getting his character onto the stage and letting him unpack his trunk.”198 O’Neill’s bottom line was that modern realism had rendered soliloquies obsolete; the soliloquy was now considered a worn-out throwback that made characters seem like mere symbols rather than actual human beings. What theatrical device, then, was left to express true conflict, the psychic pain and inner language of the speaker? O’Neill’s imagination was ill served by “kitchen sink” realism because its most vital edict is the “fourth-wall illusion”—the idea that characters must disregard the audience as if there were a fourth wall standing between them. Hence the soliloquy was consigned to Shakespeare and hack melodrama. No sane person looks off into the distance and bares his soul, just as actual people don’t randomly break into song and dance as they do in musical theater. To make a connection with the audience, the dialogue must be “natural.” Light neatly summed up O’Neill’s grounds for reverting to the novel this way:
The arena of vital action, the island of immediacy the dramatist certainly has, but the submerged mountain holding it up to the present remains submerged. To disclose this submerged foundation, the dramatist only has the soliloquy. But the soliloquy is in the dramatic warehouse relegated there by modern realism. … The novelist as God, as reporter, as surrogate for the hero has both exterior and interior command of his work. The dramatist has only exterior command[;] what interior life of his characters he can reveal to his audience must flash through the palings of the stockade enclosing him. Providing he remains true to his theme and his character, the choice open to the novelist is wide. Philosophy, social comment, descriptions of nature, human moods, satire, even dramatics, all and almost everyone, are allowable in a novelist’s medium. Though he has as deep and inevitable insight, as revealing an interpretation of the human condition as the novelist, the dramatist’s effect is achieved by song-and-echo, blow-and-impact, fight-and-victory, whereas with the same human material the novelist has built a cathedral or at least a chapel of the understanding.199
O’Neill had already written four works of fiction—“Tomorrow,” “The Screenews of War,” S.O.S., and the lost “The Hairy Ape.” But aside from “Tomorrow,” the others were meant as moneymakers, not truth seekers. Even “Tomorrow” struck O’Neill as “inferior stuff not worth republishing” when Boni and Liveright asked permission to rerelease it.200 Therein lay the problem: O’Neill knew he was a bad hand at writing fiction, as bad as Mark Twain was at drama. Probably worse. (Agnes Boulton could write fiction well, which must partly explain why, subconsciously at least, he’d tossed her manuscript into the fire at Brook Farm—envy.) Now genreless for a time, a creative standstill ensued that would last for over eighty days. After The Great God Brown, a new O’Neill play wouldn’t be staged for two years. But in the years to follow O’Neill’s abiding wish to converge fiction with drama would come to define his unique dramatic voice.201
At Brook Farm that fall, 1925, O’Neill mostly read, chopped wood, trimmed trees, and took long hikes through the woods with Boulton in a mutually desired but doomed attempt to repair their widening rift. Nothing lightened his mood. “Too bored,” he wrote in his diary, “R’field is no home for me! Dull as hell.” He even got bored with his diary: “Read. Worked in woods … Ditto … Ditto … Ditto … Ditto …” These lackadaisical notations are only interrupted on December 10, the day The Fountain opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre, “Alas!” “Refused to look at any [Fountain] notices,” he entered the next day. “I know how bad they must be.”202
The Fountain charts the ill-fated expedition of the Spanish colonialist Juan Ponce de León after he’d signed on with Christopher Columbus for the famed explorer’s second voyage to the New World. Robert Edmond Jones designed breathtaking sets for the exotic locales and engineered a series of equally arresting sound and lighting effects. Given The Fountain’s extravagant time shifts (stretching over a twenty-year period), enormous cast, and demanding scene changes—Moorish and Spanish courtyards in Spain and Puerto Rico, a Florida beach and jungle, and a monastery in Cuba—Jones’s accomplishment, if not necessarily O’Neill’s, was extraordinary.
Although O’Neill refused to look at reviews of The Fountain, he might’ve been surprised that more than a few were appreciative; the bulk of them nevertheless echoed the sentiments of Gilbert W. Gabriel of the Sun, who wrote, “Ponce de Leon and his coming to Florida, that land which has passed from the Spanish brethren to the Marx Brothers, are merely pegs on which to drape the pity of man’s everlasting legend of a spring of eternal youth. They are voluminous drapes and they draggle.” No reviewer, however, came close to abhorring the play as much as O’Neill himself. By the time of its opening, he’d lost interest in anything to do with the production and turned his full attention to The Great God Brown, a play that, he promised, was “worth a dozen Fountains.”203
On December 27, O’Neill was offered “a ray of hope amid general sick despair.” Kenneth Macgowan, after a Scotch-soaked evening at Brook Farm, had intervened in his friend’s debilitating alcohol problem by scheduling him an appointment with a top psychiatrist, Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton. The morning after his night with Macgowan, during which he’d polished off no less than a full bottle of Scotch, O’Neill again began his method of tapering off—five drinks the first day, then three, then one. On New Year’s Eve, 1925, he wrote, “On wagon. Good’bye—without regret—1925 (except for a few mos. In Bermuda).” His diary entry for New Year’s Day, 1926, greets the year with the hopeful exhortation, “Welcome in a new dawn, & pray!”204
To get a handle on the severity of his new patient’s condition, Dr. Hamilton asked Boulton to jot down a summary of O’Neill’s drinking patterns over the past year and a half. (The resulting document, incidentally, plainly shows that her husband had lied to her about the extent of his drinking over the fall and early winter on his visits to New York.) O’Neill and Boulton also agreed to take part in an ambitious study on marriage the psychiatrist had been conducting. In the book that resulted from dozens of similar interviews, A Research in Marriage (1929), which also includes data samples from Macgowan and his wife, Edna, Hamilton distilled his conclusions from anonymous statistical data, so it’s difficult to parse what O’Neill and Boulton contributed to the study themselves (though in the column “Sources of [Marital] Friction for Which Mothers Were Blamed,” only one participant listed “Mother’s drug habit”).205 Hamilton burrowed deeper into the cause of O’Neill’s alcoholism than anyone had before, at one point asking him to pencil out his psychoanalytic diagram of his childhood development. O’Neill obliged, and the diagram clearly shows his resentment of his mother’s emotional absence, his loss of admiration for his father, the trauma of his nanny Sarah Sandy’s horror stories, and his feelings of abandonment at having been thrust into boarding school before his seventh birthday.
Hamilton’s final diagnosis for O’
Neill wasn’t especially enlightening: an acute Oedipus complex. “Why, all he had to do was read my plays,” O’Neill deadpanned.206 Perhaps less obvious, though a clear undercurrent in his dramas, was the verdict of psychiatrist Dr. Louis E. Bisch, a neighbor in Bermuda. Over the previous summer O’Neill had consulted with Dr. Bisch, who prescribed him veronal, seemingly unaware of his patient’s history with the drug, to help counter his alcohol-induced insomnia. On O’Neill’s thirty-seventh birthday, October 16, 1925, Bisch trundled out to Brook Farm for a visit, during which, O’Neill noted, they shared “much talk about divorce.”207 After meeting with him several times, Bisch concluded that “O’Neill had an unconscious homosexual attraction toward his father, which he carried over to some of his friendships for men. His antagonism toward his mother carried over to his relationships with women; because his mother had failed him, all women would fail him, and he had to take revenge on them. All women had to be punished.”208
That he was Irish didn’t help with the drinking either. By the mid-twentieth century, the Irish in America were statistically proven to be twenty-five times more likely to succumb to alcoholism than any other American group; as one priest described it, aptly for O’Neill, “The characteristic Irish alcoholic syndrome is of the compulsive perfectionist who feels that he has never been loved for who he is but only for what he can do.”209
The degree of Hamilton’s helpfulness to O’Neill was probably negligible. “Gene liked Hamilton personally,” Boulton said later, while debunking the doctor’s presumed success, “but was not helped by him in his drinking problem.”210 Whatever credit Hamilton deserves or doesn’t, O’Neill knew he’d arrived at a physical and emotional impasse. His cycle of drunkenness, elevation, violence, and despair would cease only when he’d “convinced” himself, as his Provincetown friend Harry Kemp put it, “that alcohol is no friend to creative writing—is nobody’s friend and soon a bad master.”211 O’Neill could dedicate his adult years to whiskey, as his brother had, or to writing, as he’d tried to do, but together they were unsustainable. And on that New Year’s Eve, he believed he had, at long last, conquered his seemingly unconquerable illness.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 35
