Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Back in the United States, Dynamo’s inglorious flop and the gossip over O’Neill’s divorce proceedings were compounded by a plagiarism suit filed against him over Strange Interlude. The novelist Gladys Lewis claimed that O’Neill had stolen from the plot of her novel, published under the penname George Lewys, The Temple of Pallas-Athenæ (or, as O’Neill called it, “The Crap-Can of Pallas-Athenae”). “And her fool book—which I haven’t yet seen—was privately printed at that,” he told Macgowan. “It’s like accusing a drunkard of stealing marshmallow sundaes.”92 The presiding judge in the case agreed. “Absurdity could not rise to greater heights,” he said in court. “The plaintiff cannot claim a copyright on words in the dictionary or on usual English idioms, or on ideas.”93

  The notoriety had still begun to wear thin on O’Neill: “Who wants this garbage bath they are pleased to call fame? I’d like to give it away. It has always been about as welcome to me as an attack of hives, anyway! I’ve wasted almost as much energy ducking its annoyances as I’ve put in my work. I feel as pawed over by the sweaty paws of the public as a 4-bit whore—and correspondingly defiled! … But I am forgetting our old watchword of the Revolution—F——k ’em all!”94

  Bluster aside, O’Neill was now an exposed nerve emotionally, a man truly desperate for a protector. Carlotta Monterey, for all her perceived faults, was ideally suited to this task. She was not passive aggressive in the usual mold of American celebrity culture; her aggression was proactive and unyielding. She vowed to shield O’Neill from the annoyances of life, public and private, and thus enable him to compose his greatest plays yet. Any discussion of the early years would be forbidden. She would construct a fortress around her husband that would repel his past associations, including anyone connected to Agnes Boulton, which soon came to include his children. “We’re going to have trouble with these offspring,” she wrote Commins later, “but (knowing how Gene takes all this) will try to be the buffer between them.”95 By the standards she’d set for her devotion to “a man of genius,” as Charlie Chaplin put it, her crusade was an unmitigated success. And within a few years, O’Neill would sound off with equal vehemence against those “who gave me the double-cross when I went to Europe.” “They owed me loyalty, after all I’d done for them,” he told Richard Madden. “They pretended to be my friends, and as soon as my back was turned gave me the knife. They chose which side of the fence they were on, then! Let them stick to it—for my side is barred to them now! There are some things I will neither forget nor forgive!”96

  Most theater critics stateside agreed that Dynamo had likely sounded the death knell for “America’s First Dramatist.” But although O’Neill’s reputation might have been withering on the vine back in the United States, his plays were filling houses to capacity in Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, England, and France. Strange Interlude was a sensation at Stockholm’s Royal Theatre, All God’s Chillun Got Wings was produced at Moscow’s Kamerny Theatre, Lazarus Laughed at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, and a production of The Hairy Ape was mounted in Paris by the avant-garde company of Georges Pitoëff, among many others.

  Europeans attacked O’Neill’s plays too, of course, but O’Neill likened his reaction to that of boxing champ Jack Sharkey when asked how it felt in the ring when crowds booed him. Sharkey had replied, “Fuck ’em, I’m getting their dough!”97 O’Neill largely chalked up the bad press to cultural arrogance on the part of Europeans: “We mustn’t dare infringe on Europe’s private property, the Arts.”98 But behind closed doors, he was distressed by their lack of civility about American culture. “They are forced to see our industrialism swamping them and forcing them to bad imitations on every hand, and it poisons them,” he wrote Nathan. “They are bound they’ll die at the post rather than acknowledge an American has anything to show them in any line of writers and artists. It’s amusing—and disgusting!—this clinging of theirs to their last superiority of the past!”99

  Europe’s supercilious attitude toward American art was actually on the wane. European dramatists—Gerhart Hauptmann and Ernst Toller of Germany, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig of Austria, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey of Ireland, Henri-René Lenormand of France, Maxim Gorky of Russia—all followed O’Neill’s progress closely.100 (The Russians were so enamored of Desire Under the Elms that they held a mock public trial for Abbie Putnam’s infanticide. She was acquitted.) “Along with Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov and his great love, Shakespeare,” Shivaun O’Casey has said of her father, Sean, “he would place Eugene O’Neill.”101 Shaw, in what has to be the most artfully crafted left-handed compliment O’Neill ever received, referred to him as a “Yankee Shakespeare peopling his Isle with Calibans.”102 James Joyce was noncommittal, though he conceded that O’Neill himself was “thoroughly Irish.”103 By 1932, in fact, Irish writers would claim him as one of their own: “I was asked to be a member of the Irish Academy,” O’Neill wrote Eugene Jr. with obvious delight, “being organized by Shaw & Yeats & [Lennox] Robinson, etc.—and accepted. Of course, I’m ‘associate’ because not Irish born. But this I regard as an honor, whereas other Academies don’t mean much to me. Anything with [W. B.] Yeats, Shaw, A.E., O’Casey, [Liam] Flaherty, Robinson in it is good enough for me. Joyce refused to join—hates Academies. … Still & all I think little Ireland will have an Academy that will compare favorably with any country’s. At any rate, I’m pleased about all this.”104

  In Germany, the novelist Thomas Mann publicly declared that he considered All God’s Chillun Got Wings “one of the most impressive plays that has ever been written.” “O’Neill is absolutely new and different and a real dramatist,” Mann said. “He is one of the great figures in the history of the theatre.” “We are well aware of your [Americans’] Puritanism and the other difficulties under which [Americans] struggle,” another German belletrist remarked of O’Neill’s role as an American cultural emissary to Europe. “It is all very well for you to maintain your policy of splendid isolationism in international affairs that touch us only on the material side, but you can’t prevent our joining you intellectually.”105 Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, but O’Neill, along with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, was already on the short list.106 (Lewis would become the first American to win it the following year.)

  Patience, a trait O’Neill demonstrably lacked up to then, was required to orchestrate a comeback in the United States. But he resolved to “let nothing or no one hurry or any consideration influence me to seek a production until I’m damn good and ready for it.” “I’ve learned a lesson—,” he wrote Fitzie Fitzgerald, “forty is the right age to begin to learn!”107 For his next project, O’Neill revisited a Civil War–era drama that had been brewing in his imagination since 1926: “Use the plots from Greek tragedy in modern surroundings—the New England play of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra & Orestes—Oedipus,” and that May 1929, he knew it would be a trilogy, to which he gave the title Mourning Becomes Electra.

  During his two years at Plessis, O’Neill spent the bulk of his time alone in his study, located in one of his turrets, focusing intently on the new trilogy. Between November and August, he wrote steadily for 225 days.108 Even when he and Monterey vacationed for a month in the Canary Islands to escape the “lifeless and depressing” French weather in March 1931, he concentrated on the writing.109 Toiling through at least half a dozen drafts, he alternately experimented with masks, soliloquies, and asides for the fourteen-act trilogy, eventually abandoning the avant-garde techniques of his recent plays; but in so doing he found he’d written himself into a corner: “The unavoidable entire melodramatic action,” O’Neill was convinced, “must be felt as working out of psychic fate from the past—thereby attaining tragic significance—or else!—a hell of a problem, a modern tragic interpretation of classic fate without benefit of gods … fate springing out of the family.” And he grappled once again with the abiding predicament of how to replace the outmoded soliloquy. “Oh for a la
nguage to write drama in!” he wrote Joseph Wood Krutch. “For a speech that is dramatic and isn’t just conversation! I’m so straight-jacketed by writing in terms of talk! I’m so fed up with the dodge-question of dialect! But where to find that language?”110

  For a brief time, O’Neill was even convinced that talking pictures might provide the format he needed for a modern-day soliloquy. He watched his very first “talky,” The Broadway Melody, with great interest in Paris in November 1929, and exited the theater bursting with ideas about the potential of multimedia: “a stage play combined with a screen talky background to make alive visually and vocally the memories, etc. in the minds of the characters” (a concept he would abandon but return to with his 1941 one-act tour de force Hughie). “Talkies,” he believed, had the potential to be “a medium for real artists if they got a chance at it.”111 It was an ironic change of heart. The spring before, the billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes had offered him, through MGM, the astounding sum of $100,000 to write the screenplay for his film Hell’s Angels. O’Neill responded to the offer by collect telegram, billed by the word with a maximum of twenty words: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. O’Neill.”112

  But his envy of novelists lingered, and he concluded that dramatic language was best found when he’d written plays with their book form in mind rather than a staged performance. “Hereafter I write plays primarily as literature to be read—,” he told Macgowan, “and the more simply they read, the better they will act, no matter what technique is used.” After much deliberation, he’d made up his mind that neither the masks he deployed for symbolic effect in The Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed nor the thought asides of Strange Interlude and Dynamo would heighten his trilogy’s tragic power. Instead he offered only the implication of masks, as “a visual symbol of [the protagonists’] separateness, the fated isolation of this family, the mark of their fate which makes them dramatically distinct from the rest of the world.”113 But each character’s expression in repose would share a “strange, life-like mask impression” (CP2, 897).

  O’Neill appropriated Mourning Becomes Electra’s plot and characters from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and its later adaptations by Sophocles and Euripides. Together the plays, The Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted, chronicle the decline of the Mannons, a prominent New England family, and O’Neill’s shared plotline with the Oresteia is unmistakable: a beloved leader (King Agamemnon in Aeschylus, General Ezra Mannon in O’Neill) returns home victorious from a great war—the Trojan War in Aeschylus, the American Civil War in O’Neill—only to be murdered by his spiteful wife (Clytemnestra, Christine), who has had an affair with a romantic stranger (Aegisthus, Adam Brant) in her husband’s absence; in turn, the wife is destroyed by her progeny (Electra, Lavinia). In both trilogies, daughters and sons seek revenge for their fathers’ murder, though in O’Neill, their act of revenge intensifies rather than alleviates their suffering.

  In Euripides’ version, the son Orestes succumbs to insanity after his complicity in his mother’s murder, as Orin Mannon does in O’Neill’s modern adaptation. But O’Neill offers a sequel to the Oresteia, as he had for Lazarus, that presents the torments of Lavinia (Electra) after her mother’s death. The Mannon family occupies a mansion in a Connecticut town (New London) with a “white temple front … like an incongruous mask fixed on the somber, stone house” (CP2, 928).114 (In Aeschylus, this is the house of Atreus.) The mansion’s gray stone behind the white columns represents a mask that conceals the “New England granite” behind, a flinty deliberateness that rejects the kind of sentimental weakness O’Neill embodied as a youth. Through Christine Mannon, O’Neill describes the mansion as having a “pagan temple front stuck like a mask on Puritan gray ugliness!” (CP2, 903–4). (O’Neill’s architectural depiction closely resembles New London’s Shaw Mansion, now a museum off Bank Street and the headquarters of the New London County Historical Society. The Shaw family also, like the fictional Mannons, figured prominently in the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.)

  Some time later, though before its production, O’Neill shared his script with a select few preliminary readers, including the Times’s drama critic Brooks Atkinson, whose opinion he respected and who was one of the only critics to praise Dynamo. As so many reviewers had in the past, Atkinson critiqued it by evoking Freud and Jung and the Greeks. But O’Neill insisted to Barrett Clark that he knew “enough about men and women to have written Mourning Becomes Electra almost exactly as it is if I had never heard of Freud or Jung or the others. … None compared to what psychological writers of the past like Dostoevsky, etc. have had.”115

  Mourning Becomes Electra unmistakably parallels Dostoevsky’s probings into the “Russian soul.” But in O’Neill’s play, New England Puritanism is the “soul” governing the Mannons—psychologically, historically, religiously, genetically—and shapes the playwright’s modern interpretation of the mythic gods, fates, and furies of Greek mythology. “Beyond the general plot outline of the first two plays there is nothing of the Greek notion about it now,” he said. “I have simplified it until all its Greek similarities are out—almost.”116 O’Neill declared, in fact, that he held the whole faddish presumption of so-called Greek universality in contempt: “What modern audience was ever purged by pity and terror by witnessing a Greek tragedy or what modern mind by reading one? It can’t be done! We are too far away, we are in a world of different values! … We can admire while we pretend to understand—but our understanding is always a pretense! … Our tragedy is just that we have only ourselves, that there is nothing to be purged into except a belief in the guts of man, good or evil, who faces unflinchingly the black mystery of his own soul!”117

  Given the disastrous leaks about Dynamo being part of a trilogy, O’Neill kept his new trilogy a careful secret before sending it that April to the Theatre Guild, which enthusiastically accepted it for the next season. This time O’Neill knew he would have to oversee the rehearsals in New York personally. (Besides, his and Monterey’s regal life in France had become to both of them “dull beyond bearing.”)118 What their reception back home would be like was a terrifying uncertainty. The smear campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic had inflamed tempers, destroyed friendships, and taken a toll on their two years of marriage. The finest distillation of his abiding love for Monterey over the course of their exile in France can be found in his inscription to her of Mourning Becomes Electra, as a proxy for the failed Dynamo, a work that “did not represent what you are to me”:

  To Carlotta

  In memory of the interminable days of rain in which you bravely suffered in silence that this trilogy might be born—days when I had to work but you had nothing but household frets and a blank vista through the salon windows of the gray land of Le Plessis, with the wet black trees still and dripping, and the mist wraiths mourning over the drowned fields—days when you had the self-forgetting love to greet my lunchtime depressing, sunk preoccupations with a courageous cheering banter—days which for you were bitterly lonely, when I seemed far away and lost to you in a grim, savage gloomy country of my own—days which were for you like hateful boring inseparable enemies who nagged at nerves and spirit until an intolerable ennui and life-sickness poisoned your spirit—

  In short, days in which you collaborated, as only deep love can, in the writing of this trilogy of the damned! These scripts are rightly yours and my presenting them is a gift of what is half yours already. Let us hope what the trilogy may have in it will repay the travail we’ve gone through for its sake!

  I want these scripts to remind you that I have known your love with my love even when I have seemed not to know that I have seen it, even when I have appeared most blind; that I have felt it warmly around me always, (even in my study in the closing pages of an act!), sustaining and comforting, a warm secure sanctuary for the man after the author’s despairing solitudes and inevitable defeats, a victory of love-in-love,—mother, and wife and mistress and friend!—And col
laborator!

  Collaborator, I love you!

  Gene

  Le Plessis—April 23, 1931119

  The Prodigal Returns

  Once aboard the passenger liner Statendam, O’Neill cabled the Theatre Guild that he and Monterey would be landing on May 23, 1931. The ship was actually scheduled to dock six days earlier, but the ploy offered them a few days’ peace after a stormy, fogbound crossing. There they could brace for the inevitable hullabaloo from the press, which had been alerted ahead of time by the Guild that the playwright was returning stateside to supervise the production of his latest magnum opus. Newspapers across the country printed the same barb: “When Eugene O’Neill returned from Europe he made a very dramatic arrival. Six of his trunks were filled with the manuscript of one play.” O’Neill and Monterey’s arrival was discovered several days earlier than planned, however; and the story landed, as anticipated, on the front page of all the papers. What wasn’t anticipated was how the press had found out they were in New York.

  Monterey’s ex-husband Ralph Barton, at thirty-nine years old, had somehow received word (possibly through Carl Van Vechten, who’d remained friends with both Monterey and Barton) that she and O’Neill were at the Madison, a hotel only a few blocks away from his Upper East Side penthouse. A day or two later, on Tuesday, May 20, Barton fired his .25-caliber handgun into his right temple. His body was discovered the next morning by his maid, Mary Jefferson, and the sight made a gruesome tableau: Barton was splayed out in bed wearing silk pajamas, a half-smoked cigarette in his left hand and the pistol in his right; also on the bed was a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, a staple for any artist’s library, open to illustrations of the human heart.