That spring and summer of 1937, the O’Neills rented two houses in the Bay Area, first in Berkeley, then in Lafayette, where O’Neill could convalesce in peace. Until the following fall he had to appear at the hospital for twice-weekly treatments to prevent further infections. In late spring, now determined to make California their permanent home, O’Neill and Monterey purchased over 150 acres of verdant farmland outside of the town of Danville. The property commanded an Edenic panorama overlooking the gently sloping grassy hills of the San Ramon Valley. There they would build their second house together. Once more insisting he’d found paradise, he wrote Nathan that his new home was “better than Casa Genotta—as you will agree when you visit.”231 Then he wrote Barrett Clark, “This is final home and harbor for me. I love California. Moreover, the climate is one I know I can work and keep healthy in.”232
“Here we have a splendid climate,” Monterey wrote Saxe Commins with typical candor: “No negroes, sand flies, hookworms or mosquitoes. All of which I dislike—in quantity.”233 Having sold the bulk of Casa Genotta’s furnishings to the new owners, the Cluett family, Monterey adorned their new home in Danville almost exclusively with Chinese decor. She was furious with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom she blamed for the cost of the unionized workers building their new house, designed to accommodate eight thousand books for O’Neill and three hundred pairs of shoes for her and which would ultimately cost them over $100,000.234 (The cost of the property’s upkeep forced O’Neill’s hand, and he sold Hollywood the rights to make a pedestrian film adaptation of The Hairy Ape for $30,000.)235 The new home did, in truth, offer the most fruitful creative environment of any of O’Neill’s previous retreats, even finer than the Sphinx-like dunes of Peaked Hill Bar. O’Neill named their new home Tao House after the Chinese philosophy of Lao-tse. “Tao” translates roughly as “the right way,” and O’Neill believed, George Jean Nathan’s ribbing aside, that he’d found it at long last.
By the time O’Neill and Monterey had settled into Tao House, O’Neill viewed his two children with Agnes Boulton as “nothing to be proud of, or take pleasure in—unlike Eugene—and unless they change drastically, I am off them for life.”236 He sent them birthday and Christmas presents, but claimed that they hardly ever responded to thank him. Monterey, wary of any connection to his children, was intercepting their letters. Over the next couple of years, in fact, Oona O’Neill sent repeated requests to visit her father, but he claimed he never got them, and Monterey was the only one who made contact with her directly.237 Whatever her rationale, these circumstances had consequences: O’Neill’s paternal love was not unconditional. He accused Shane of ignoring his Nobel, which Shane had not—as Monterey’s diary makes clear on the day they found out about the prize—and his hospitalization in Oakland (which he may have), and he threatened to cut his son from his life entirely if Shane didn’t start giving as much as he took. Shane had dropped out of two schools, Lawrenceville and the Florida Military Academy, and was now attending the Ralston Creek School in Colorado, from which he sent his father a carved walrus tusk for his forty-ninth birthday. O’Neill sent his thanks and forgave him, for the time being, but still brandished Eugene’s academic achievements as a contrast to Shane’s failures.
Tao House.
(COURTESY OF THE HAGEMAN COLLECTION, THE EUGENE O’NEILL FOUNDATION, DANVILLE, CALIF.)
In May 1937, Eugene Jr. announced his divorce from Betty Green and his new marriage to the daughter of a mathematics professor at Yale, Janet Hunter Longley. But as well as telling his father about his new wife and his work as a classics professor at Yale, Eugene complained of an inexplicable tremor in his hands. O’Neill responded that it was a hereditary affliction, one that he had suffered from his whole life: “The whole matter of tremors seems to be something doctors know little about, judging from my experience. I have had mine ever since I can remember, long before I had even smoked my firsty cornsilk cigarette, let alone dissipated any, and my mother had suffered from the same complaint, and told me her father had had it too.” The only advice O’Neill could offer was to “regard it as a heritage of God knows how long a line of people with high-strung nerves, and bear the embarrassing discomfort of it as best one may.”238
The clinical term for their condition was “familial essential tremor,” and O’Neill’s was worsening. He’d also begun to show signs of a neurodegenerative disease that set new limits on his creative output. This brought terrible losses but also some gains: the disease, in the end, wouldn’t merely dictate O’Neill’s own professional course, but in substantial ways that of American theater history as a whole.
By January 1938, the O’Neills had occupied Tao House, with renewed hopes of domestic permanency. For several months, it throbbed with the syncopated percussion of carpenters’ hammers accompanied by the scraping of the plasterers and the digging of the pool builders. It was not a productive time for O’Neill. The ongoing construction of their new residence, his persistent dental ailments, an angry case of hives, and a diagnosis of neuritis (a nerve condition that sent excruciating pain shooting through his writing arm for several months) ruled out anything but the most perfunctory work on his Cycle. He rebuffed the Theatre Guild’s plea for a new play from its newly minted Nobel laureate; but once Tao House was completed that spring and his neuritis had stabilized (after the removal of five teeth, the apparent cause of the affliction), he reported that “the old bean is functioning better than it has in years.”239 Within a year, he’d completed drafts of the Cycle’s first four plays: Greed of the Meek, And Give Me Death, A Touch of the Poet, and More Stately Mansions.240
That spring of 1938, he received visits from Shane, who planned to attend the University of Colorado in the fall, and Eugene, who’d just released an anthology, The Complete Greek Drama, coedited with Whitney J. Oates, through O’Neill’s own publisher Random House. By winter, however, after learning that Shane (then experimenting with drugs and alcohol) had abandoned college plans for another year at Lawrenceville, he began thinking of the boy as “a parasitic slob of a Boulton” who “simply does not interest me as a human being.”241
O’Neill hadn’t seen his daughter, Oona, for eight years, but their reunion in late August 1939 proved a “bright spot” for the playwright. She’d been chaperoned on the flight to the West Coast by her mother, or “the invertebrate trollop,” as he referred to Boulton. (He called his alimony and child support checks Boulton’s “dole,” the Irish term for welfare.) It was the first time Boulton and O’Neill had seen each other in more than a decade. Boulton was polite to O’Neill and Monterey, but she wasn’t invited into Tao House and headed south.242
To the surprise of all parties concerned, Oona delighted her father and stepmother. “A charming girl,” he beamed, “both in looks and manners.”243 O’Neill’s nurse Kathryne Albertoni was on duty during Oona’s visit and recalled Monterey’s reaction: “She said she had good manners. … That [was] important to Carlotta, manners.” After the visit was over, Monterey told Albertoni she’d been relieved to discover that, whatever her feelings toward Boulton, Oona “was brought up properly.”244 (She didn’t share this opinion of her own daughter, Cynthia, whom she regarded as unrefined and unladylike, too much of a tomboy.)245 Fourteen-year-old Oona enjoyed her stepmother’s company too, though she’d later acknowledge she was mainly in awe of her.246 Most of her time was spent with Monterey shopping, touring, and sunbathing. Each day O’Neill would work in his upstairs office, then appear in the afternoon for tea and a swim.
Monterey repeatedly lectured Oona about the importance of financial independence, though she herself had lived lavishly for years off her former lover James Speyer’s bottomless trust fund established in her name. “Earn your own way and don’t depend on your father,” she said.247 O’Neill imparted the same advice to Shane: “You must find yourself, and your own self,” he warned his increasingly wayward son. “You’ve got to find the guts in yourself to take hold of your own life. No one can do it for you and
no one can help you. You have got to go on alone, without help, or it won’t mean anything to you.”248 O’Neill and Monterey were preparing these children, at the earliest possible age, not to expect financial support in adulthood.
Eugene and Oona O’Neill at Tao House, August 1939.
(COURTESY OF THE HAGEMAN COLLECTION, THE EUGENE O’NEILL FOUNDATION, DANVILLE, CALIF.)
During the war years, Monterey became, according to Bennett Cerf, “more of a jailer than a wife” for O’Neill, though Cerf was one of O’Neill’s few associates who still had cordial relations with her. Behind two sets of electric gates that Monterey had installed at the approach to Tao House, “she could watch over the terrain like an old feudal lord guarding against invading armies.” “She just threw [his Guild associates and old friends] out of his life,” Cerf said, “and took possession of him herself.” Robert Edmond Jones went to visit O’Neill at Tao House for three weeks but returned to New York after only two. Afterward, he met Jimmy Light for dinner at the Harvard Club where, though Jones usually didn’t drink, he ordered a Scotch. Then another. “I’ve been watching a slow case of murder,” he said. Similarly, Russel Crouse, who’d replaced Robert Sisk as press agent for the Guild, reported after visiting Tao House that “Gene reminded me of the stories you read in newspapers about someone who’d been chained up for years and fed in a closet or a tiny room, until freed eventually. For a long while, every time we’d meet, Gene would hold back like a wary animal; then he would warm up and start to wag his tail.” When Eugene Jr. arrived in August 1939 with his third wife, Sally Hayward, Monterey was appalled by the incursion. “He married a girl who looks like a Minnesota fullback,” she scoffed. “They think they’re going to stay for two weeks. Ha, ha, ha! I’ll have them out of the house in four days.” O’Neill himself found Sally “all right in her way—which is all-too-familiar Connecticut small city type—but, from my angle, a rather disappointing daughter-in-law.”249
O’Neill’s routine when composing a play was to sketch out a scenario of the story, then write a lengthy first draft, and then pare that down to its final length. For More Stately Mansions, near completion by 1939, he didn’t think he’d “be able to cut length much.”250 At a minimum of ten hours of playing time, this script remains the longest in his canon by far. More Stately Mansions, the sequel to A Touch of the Poet, unfolds in Massachusetts from 1832 to 1841 and revolves around the Panic of 1837. As O’Neill’s conflicted, mother-obsessed protagonist Simon Harford’s wealth and power accumulate over the course of the play, his acquisitiveness gives way to the obsessive, property-driven, monopolizing instincts that had led American financiers to their doom from the Panic of 1837 to the market crash of 1929. O’Neill offers no solutions for Simon or for the nation; he simply sends his protagonist back to where he’d lived when he first met his wife, Sara Melody—an idyllic cabin in the woods. Here Simon, a defeated relic of capitalism, may find solace and peace in the love of his wife and children.
Once again, O’Neill bypassed the agitprop that had taken over American drama in the Depression era: “I suppose these lousy times make it inevitable that many authors get caught in the sociological propaganda mill,” he said. “The hell of it seems to be, when an artist starts saving the world, he starts losing himself. I know, I have been bitten by the salvation bug myself at times.”251 He admitted envying authors with a belief in “salvation through any sociological idealism,” but couldn’t abide those movements or an appeal to God or any brand of social reform. “My true conviction,” he said, “being that the one reform worth cheering for is the Second Flood.”252
“With the world exploding into revolution,” O’Neill discarded More Stately Mansions and ultimately the Cycle as a whole. Hitler, that “little maggot of a man,” had already invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland and commenced a policy of genocide against Jews, Gypsies, and other populations of Europe; Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany; the United States was still caught in the quagmire of the Great Depression; and O’Neill’s beloved Far East was plunged into its own gruesome conflict.253 American involvement as an antidote offered him no solace whatsoever. The absence of any measurable “intelligence in our government,” O’Neill grumbled in a letter to Bennett Cerf, made it clear to him that their country would be directly engaged in the global bloodletting soon enough: “Anyone who expects anything of government these days except colossal suicidal stupidity seems to me a moron of optimism,” he told Cerf. “Tell Saxe I am rapidly becoming reconverted to a sterling Anarchism!”254
O’Neill’s isolationist stance was especially true with regard to the German Luftwaffe’s terror bombing campaign against England. The “O’Neill” in him, he wrote Eugene Jr., took the Battle of Britain “philosophically”: “Remembering the Black and Tan atrocities committed by the British not so many years ago. … One might even call it justice.” If Ireland were invaded, he said, “I shall probably volunteer at once.” When asked to sign an open letter to Prime Minister Éamon de Valera of the Irish Free State urging the leader to join forces with the Allies against Germany, O’Neill flatly refused. “My final conviction is that we Irish Americans owe it to the Irish people not to attempt to influence their decision by any means whatsoever.” “No dead hand from the past bothers me,” he assured the petitioner, “although I was reared with a hymn of hate for England the predominant lullaby. It is simply a matter of conscience.”255
After France’s surrender, O’Neill wrote Lawrence Langner that he’d given up entirely on writing, though hoped to return to his Cycle when he was able. “To tell the truth,” he told Langner, “like anyone else with any imagination, I have been absolutely sunk by this damned world debacle. The Cycle is on the shelf, and God knows if I can ever take it up again because I cannot foresee any future in this country or anywhere else to which it could spiritually belong.”256 “People are too damned preoccupied with the tragedy of war now—as they should be—to want to face such plays,” he wrote Theresa Helburn. “And I don’t blame them. I’d rather spend an escapist evening with legs and music myself—or with pipe dreams that were treated as truth.”257
O’Neill’s notion of “pipe dreams that were treated as truth” helped to subdue his horrific, insomnia-inducing wartime nightmares and rekindle an old idea. Over the summer and fall of 1939, he completed a draft of his monumental four-act play The Iceman Cometh. But the prospect of the work ever reaching the stage, O’Neill remarked, was “secondary and incidental to me, and even, quite unimportant.”258 In the earliest years of World War II, a time when O’Neill was desperate to quell his premonition of humanity’s doom, Iceman’s theme was closely akin to Pandora opening Zeus’s forbidden box: all the world’s evils had been released from it; but the last thing to emerge, without which humanity could never endure, was the specter of hope.259
The Iceman Cometh features a band of down-and-out regulars at Harry Hope’s saloon, a rundown Raines Law hotel modeled mostly after Jimmy the Priest’s, but also the downstairs bar at the Garden Hotel and the Hell Hole. Each of the characters in the play resembles, with little modification, a vital figure from O’Neill’s heavy drinking days through the 1910s—James Byth, Terry Carlin, Hippolyte Havel, and Joe Smith, to name a few. (O’Neill had continued to support Carlin until his death from pneumonia in 1934.) Near the end of the first act, a salesman named Theodore “Hickey” Hickman arrives at the bar to celebrate the owner Harry Hope’s birthday; but he comes with a Messianic agenda to strip his friends of their “pipe dreams.” By doing so, he believes he can offer them salvation from their delusional, misbegotten lives. In fact the opposite is true: pipe dreams and whiskey are the only tools they have that make their lives bearable.
O’Neill first titled The Iceman Cometh “Tomorrow,” the title of his 1916 short story. The next day, however, he came up with “The Iceman Cometh,” “which I love,” he wrote George Jean Nathan, “because it characteristically expresses so much of the outer and the inner spirit of the play.”260 (In the past, t
here’s been the impression that he gleaned the title from Waldo Frank’s novel The Bridegroom Cometh [1939], though he’d had at least the idea of that title in mind since 1910–11 with his poem from Buenos Aires “The Bridegroom Weeps!”) The play’s eponymous gag, when Hickey tearfully produces a picture of his wife, then admits he left her in bed with the iceman, is based on a bawdy old joke: A man yells upstairs to his wife in the bedroom, “Has the iceman come yet?” His wife calls back, “No, but he’s breathing hard!”261 O’Neill wrote the dialogue, he said, “in exact lingo of place and 1912, as I remember it—with only the filth expletives omitted.”262
But another meaning was behind the title as well: O’Neill’s wistful remembrance of his early days at Jimmy the Priest’s, the Garden Hotel, and the Hell Hole were in a way themselves “pipe dreams.” The past requires a level of tampering, he was saying, particularly in one’s later years when death—the iceman—approaches. As such, The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill warned a friend, was “a big kind of comedy that doesn’t stay funny very long.”263
“I really admire this opus,” O’Neill told Nathan. “I think it’s about as successful an attempt at accomplishing a thing comprehensively and completely in all aspects as I’ve ever made. And I feel there are moments in it that hit as deeply and truly into the farce and humor and pity and ironic tragedy of life as anything in modern drama.” “The depth of tragedy,” he then wrote Langner, lay in stripping away the self-delusional facade, however temporarily, and exposing the “secret soul of a man stark naked” once he was bereft of his pipe dreams.264
O’Neill insisted on delaying a production until the war’s end. Only then, he predicted (wrongly, it turned out), would the hangover of postwar disillusionment fully take hold. Only then would audiences comprehend his play’s thesis—that mankind requires life-sustaining pipe dreams to endure the terrifying realities of modern life: “No, The Iceman Cometh would be wrong now,” he told Dudley Nichols. “A New York audience could neither see nor hear its meaning. The pity and tragedy of defensive pipe dreams would be deemed unpatriotic, and uninspired by the Atlantic Charter [Churchill and Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar world order], even if the audience did catch that meaning. But after the war is over, I am afraid from present indications that American audiences will understand a lot of The Iceman Cometh only too well.”265
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 48
