But over a year later, it turned out that their disquieting visit to Monte Cristo Cottage hadn’t been time wasted. On the morning of September 1, 1932, O’Neill awoke from a dream at Casa Genotta with the setting (Monte Cristo Cottage), plot, characters, themes, and even the title of a four-act play “fully formed and ready to write.”142 He’d been struggling over another God-replacement play when this idea, a comedy, descended on him that morning: Ah, Wilderness!
Ah, Wilderness! takes place during New London’s 1906 Fourth of July celebration, at which time O’Neill was preparing to head off to Princeton. The play is a sentimental portrait of the Miller family, a happy, middle-class New England clan of the kind that contrasted sharply with O’Neill’s own family and which he acutely longed to have been born into: “That’s the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been,” he said. “It was a sort of wishing out loud.”143 Nevertheless, Richard Miller, the child poet character at the play’s center, shares a great deal with his creator, and beneath the veneer of the Millers’ innocence lies more than a touch of cynical reality. Ah, Wilderness! would compel audiences to face the social and economic realities of America in the 1930s in contrast with his dreamlike portrait of a happier, simpler age. At the conclusion of Ah, Wilderness! everything turns out as it should, the fixed definition of a “comedy”—that is, until you step back into the despair of the Great Depression and, as O’Neill phrased it, the “corrupting, disintegrating influences” of the last three decades.144
Not since Desire Under the Elms had a play sprung from his imagination so fully and effortlessly. It was, he told Eugene Jr., “more the capture of a mood, an evocation [of] the spirit of a time that is dead now with all its ideals and manners & codes—the period in which my middle ’teens were spent—a memory of the time of my youth—not of my youth but of the youth in which my generation spent youth.”145 (O’Neill dedicated Ah, Wilderness! to George Jean Nathan, “who also,” he said, “once upon a time, in peg-top trousers went the pace that kills along the road to ruin.”)146
After only three weeks, some days working in excess of twelve hours at a time, O’Neill had completed a first draft. “It simply gushed out of me,” he told Saxe Commins, who was now his editor at Horace Liveright. “Evidently my unconscious had been rebelling for a long time against creation in the medium of the modern, involved, complicated, warped & self-poisoned psyche and demanded a counter-statement of simplicity and the peace that tragedy troubles but does not poison. The people in the play are of the class which I get least credit for knowing but which I really know better than any other—my whole background of New London childhood, boyhood, young manhood—the nearest approach to home I ever knew.” He was proud of the script but wary of the critical response: “I feel a great affection for it, so great that I don’t know whether I’ll ever subject it to the humiliation of production or publication.”147
O’Neill and Monterey had survived the first years of the Great Depression relatively unscathed financially, if only for the time being, while countless friends and associates were left destitute. Their mail piled up with pleas for cash from New London, New York, Provincetown, and California. Old business associates wrote asking for money, like George C. Tyler, who admitted that it was “humiliating” to prostrate himself. O’Neill assured Tyler that he understood but couldn’t help. “In short,” he wrote Tyler disingenuously, “my story is the story of everyone today.”148 Others, perhaps more deserving in O’Neill’s eyes, received a check with apologies that it couldn’t be more.
The O’Neills’ stability had largely been thanks to the huge income from Strange Interlude; and after France, Mourning Becomes Electra filled the coffers and paid for the Sea Island property. But their solvency was also due to the fact that neither he nor Monterey, though they too lost a small fortune in stocks and bonds, had overly speculated. “All that trouble,” Monterey wrote after the crash of 1929, “was caused by the wise ones using Wall Street as a roulette wheel to gamble on & further their get-rich quick schemes.”149 Some of O’Neill’s hardest-hit friends began raising funds by selling items he’d given them. Boulton sold a first edition of Beyond the Horizon O’Neill inscribed to his parents (which he retrieved from a dealer for $200), and Harold de Polo wrote to ask if he might sell a scenario of The Hairy Ape.150
But soon enough they became “house poor.” O’Neill’s collected royalties from Mourning Becomes Electra had been sunk into Casa Genotta, and even the conservative stocks and bonds they’d invested in had suddenly turned worthless. Their geographical location had its advantages, though: “Georgia is a very good spot to spend the depression in—at least, this backward neck of it,” he wrote the Guild’s publicity man Robert Sisk. “The only depression they’ve caught up with is the one inaugurated by General Sherman and General Hookworm. … One thing I know, starving isn’t on the cards for anyone down here no matter what happens. Fish, oysters, shrimps, clams, game are to be bagged even by the laziest. … Perhaps it was Providence that guides me here, having an eye to the future when I become too lazy and disgusted to bother the Drama further!”151
In early May 1933, it became clear to Saxe Commins that his employer, O’Neill’s publisher Horace Liveright, was about to go bankrupt. While the publishing house was postponing the inevitable, Commins called a meeting with the principal stockholders and gave them an ultimatum: either they provided O’Neill with the balance of his royalties for Mourning Becomes Electra and other projects, in full and within twenty-four hours, or he’d print an announcement in book pages of the New York Times that O’Neill was signing with a competitor. The blackmail worked; a certified check for the total amount landed on Commins’s desk that same afternoon. He then took a train down to Georgia and presented O’Neill with the check. After Liveright went belly up that month, every other writer on its list was paid a meager 5 percent of his or her royalties.152 Commins’s swift action on O’Neill’s behalf meant that the playwright was not only his best friend and godfather of Commins’s infant son, named Eugene after him, but indebted to him financially too.
Thus when Bennett Cerf of Random House arrived on Sea Island to discuss a contract, O’Neill, who trusted Cerf right away and was prepared to sign, insisted that Commins be granted a three-year trial to carry on as his editor. For his part, Cerf thought O’Neill was “the most beautiful man I ever met … to look at him was soul-satisfying. He looked just the way a great playwright ought to but practically never does.”153 He gladly accepted the terms. It was a good deal for Random House over time, Commins worked there closely with other illustrious authors, including William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, and Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss). The journalist Murray Kempton remarked that “no writer who ever had him for an editor would ever take another,” and Cerf later affirmed that Commins turned out to be “almost more important to us than O’Neill.”154
Eugene Jr. had returned to Germany as a graduate student at the University of Freiburg in the fall semester of 1932. Despite his high regard for German literature and culture, by spring he’d grown despondent over the rise of the Nazi Party. He wanted to come home but worried that his father, who was paying the bills, would think he’d wasted his money frivolously. On the contrary, O’Neill responded, “Do I think your plans denote incipient insanity in the family? Far from it! I approve in toto! … [I] was afraid you might have fallen under the youthfully enthusiastic spell of the Hitler hokum. My own opinion of the Nazi movement is that it is the prize clowning of this doleful era of moronic antics! The stupidity of it is simply beyond belief—the incredible misunderstanding of the psychology of other peoples and the boomerang effect of that blunder! Really, it’s hard to have any patience with the Germans now. … Here, after years of effort by their sensible leaders—and helped by the miserly gluttony of France—the world was all set to think pro-German—and now, smash!” (O’Neill’s opinions of Mussolini were as low as of Hitler: “May wild jackasses of the des
ert piss on the grave of his grandmother!”)155
Monterey, who owned German bonds, was less discerning about the Nazis. After the composer Louis Gruenberg, a Lithuanian Jew who’d written an operatic version of The Emperor Jones for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, publicly voiced disappointment that his efforts had gone unappreciated, Monterey raged, “I hope somebody puts Gruenberg in his place. But he can’t be insulted—his skin’s too thick. … Enough of him—may Hitler catch him!”156
In August 1933, O’Neill and Monterey escaped the clammy heat of the Golden Isles for a month of pike fishing, swimming, and canoeing at Big Wolf Lake Camp near the Adirondack town of Tupper Lake, New York.157 From there they attended rehearsals for Ah, Wilderness! then flew down to see a September 25 matinee of the out-of-town run at Pittsburgh’s Nixon Theater. The play’s October 2 New York premiere at the Guild Theatre heralded a remarkable production, critically and financially, which would run for a staggering 289 performances.
O’Neill’s turn toward nostalgic Americana beguiled audiences unused to the “black magician” working outside his notoriously tragic vein. During intermissions, the theater buzzed with conjecture, summed up in one audience member’s interjection after the final curtain, “Whatever possessed O’Neill to write a play like this!” Elizabeth Jordan of America reported that the Broadway gossips suspected that his wife’s influence explained the dramatic about-face; in which case, Jordan said, she “should receive the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel award, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from every American college and university.”158 The gossips weren’t far off the mark. Monterey had indeed alleviated much of her husband’s painful sense of alienation, if only temporarily, and his drama had evolved to match this fleeting mood of peace and salvation.
One disarmingly fitting choice for O’Neill’s “Comedy of Recollection,” as it was subtitled (the Theatre Guild advertised it as “An American Folk Play”), was the highly sought-after actor cast as Nat Miller, George M. Cohan. Nat Miller is O’Neill’s ideal middle-class head of the household—a good provider, a natural leader, caring, intellectually open-minded when circumstances call for it, and ferociously protective of his family. George M. Cohan, an old friend of James O’Neill’s and the most beloved song-and-dance man of the World War I era, had up to then been principally regarded as a purveyor of musical comedies. He was a popular composer too, having written such trademark ditties for the American stage as “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” The man was even born on the Fourth of July. Cohan’s Yankee Doodle patriotism, surprisingly, didn’t trouble O’Neill, who declared that the casting was spot on: “I really didn’t mean the setting [of the Fourth of July] as a shrewd device to lure Mr. Cohan to a part I wanted him for,” he said, “but I realize now he was amused at the connection the date has with his own career.” (He later referred to Cohan more candidly as “a vaudevillian who tried to turn the play into a one-man show.”)159
Most agreed with John Mason Brown’s concise assessment of Ah, Wilderness! in the New York Evening Post: “Mr. O’Neill has laid aside his Tragic Mask. Forgetting about Freud, ‘the stream of consciousness,’ the conflict between science and religion, the purple melodramas of the Greeks, the multiple natures and obsessions of his fellow mortals, and the fierce struggles his men and women have waged for years against merciless gods, he has written in ‘Ah, Wilderness!’ a comedy about ‘sweet scented youth’ which is unlike any other play that has come from his pen.”160 Hollywood took note. Two weeks after the premiere, MGM Studios, which had produced the tamed-down film version of Strange Interlude, paid him $75,000 for the film rights.161
It was time to return to more serious work. The previous summer, 1932, George Jean Nathan offered O’Neill an ideal opportunity to collect his thoughts on the use of masks in drama. Nathan had talked O’Neill into serving on the editorial board of his new literary journal the American Spectator, in which O’Neill’s name would appear on the masthead beside Nathan, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Boyd, and James Branch Cabell. As a favor to Nathan, O’Neill agreed, if reluctantly, and the playwright’s first assignment was to write an essay on modern theater for the inaugural issue. He accepted the challenge but found prose writing as difficult as ever. (He would even procrastinate on replying to letters until it became offensively late to write, then he’d wait a few days, weeks, or months more.) He’d already backed out on writing the introduction for a book of Hart Crane’s poetry, White Buildings (1926; Crane had, tragically, thrown himself off a steamship into the Gulf of Mexico that April of 1932), though O’Neill had found it in him to contribute the foreword for the polemicist, journalist, and poet Benjamin De Casseres’s Anathema! Litanies of Negation in 1928; but he’d warned De Casseres from the start that he was “an awful bum at such writing.”162 (They’d befriended one another in August 1927, after De Casseres published a piece on O’Neill in Theatre Magazine in which he described O’Neill as a figure who “almost awed me … a grim, unsmiling face taut with suffering, he seemed to say to me: ‘Excuse me for not being nice, but I’ve just returned from hell.’”)163
“My old bean simply can’t seem to get started functioning on such lines,” O’Neill admitted to Nathan while writing his essay. “It’s the same as if I asked you to write a play.”164 Still, working through his ideas on masks sufficiently appealed to him—“the only subject I can get up enough interest in”—to spend a week cobbling together his disjointed notes from over the years and produce a coherent, if epigrammatic, treatise.165 Divided into three installments, the essay appeared in American Spectator’s first three issues.166 Within this series, titled “Memoranda on Masks” and his only contribution in the Spectator’s short-lived existence, O’Neill distilled his “dogma for the new masked drama” into a single line, one that shows a logical extension of the philosophical anarchist’s credo that social forces shape inauthentic lives from both society and ourselves: “One’s outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one’s inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself.”167
“Memoranda on Masks” also hints at his next play, in which, he said, Goethe’s Faust would “have Mephistopheles wearing the Mephistophelean mask of the face of Faust. For is not the whole of Goethe’s truth for our time just that Mephistopheles and Faust are one and the same—are Faust?”168
O’Neill had struggled through seven drafts of this Faustian mask play from late 1931 to early 1934. “But that’s all in the life of an author,” he told his stepdaughter Cynthia about the difficulty of writing as a profession. “It’s always that way. You puff and sweat and groan inwardly, and like yourself and hate yourself, and after a long time, just when you’re reaching for the insect powder to take a good gob and put yourself out of your misery, the darn thing somehow gets finished and you realize you’ve really done something good and get quite fond of yourself again. Or you realize it’s punk—and you start to rewrite the whole thing.”169
A note to himself reads, “Again reach same old impasse—play always goes dead on me here where it needs to be most alive or I go dead on it—something fundamentally wrong.”170 But he did finish it, and after several iterations (“Ending of Days,” “Without End of Days,” “An End of Days”) eventually nailed down its title, Days Without End: A Modern Miracle Play.171
“The Game Isn’t Worth the Candle”
Days Without End was arguably the most abysmal failure of O’Neill’s career. When the Theatre Guild moved its production from Boston to New York’s Henry Miller’s Theatre on January 8, 1934, the four-act play received dreadful reviews and barely survived six weeks. O’Neill’s new production, as former New York governor Al Smith succinctly remarked, was a “hot potato.”172 The giant swell of goodwill O’Neill had recouped after Ah, Wilderness! receded into oblivion after its release, with notices rejecting the play as “heavy-handed and pretentious,” “fakery preachment,” “holy hokum,” and “reactionary.” Even critic
s who revered O’Neill as America’s foremost playwright were taken aback by its heavy-handed piety. “Sometimes Mr. O’Neill tells his story as though he had never written a play before,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in bewilderment. “In view of his acknowledged mastery of the theatre it is astonishing that his career can be so uneven.” Not only was Days Without End condemned for plunging below O’Neill’s talent, its Catholic message also outraged his usual fan base; the play, one critic noted, “is not modern enough, I fear, for moderns.”173
Days Without End was originally conceived as a segment of his planned trilogy “God Is Dead! Long Live—What?” The action unfolds in the midst of a spiritual crisis by a freethinking novelist named John Loving. John has a masked doppelgänger named Loving, the Mephistopheles to John’s Faust, who looms over him and scorns his incessant yearning for salvation. John’s wife, Elsa, soon discovers that he has committed adultery with her best friend. At first she refuses to forgive him and attempts suicide by exposing herself, sick with the flu, to the cold and rain of the Manhattan streets. After Elsa has been retrieved and languishes near death in their apartment bedroom, John takes a long walk and wanders into a Catholic church. A brilliant wash of sunlight shines through the stained-glass windows, and the face of the crucified savior lights up. In the throes of a spiritual transformation, John is informed by his uncle, a priest, that his wife, Elsa, has revived. His doppelgänger Loving dies at his feet as he shouts in glory, “Loves lives forever. … Life laughs with God’s love again! Life laughs with love!” The curtain falls (CP3, 180).
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 45
