O’Neill again lost his creative stride as Hitler’s blitzkrieg sank him “deeper and deeper into a profound pessimistic lethargy.” “The war news,” he wrote Oona just after completing Iceman, “has affected my ability to concentrate on my job. With so much tragic drama happening in the world, it is hard to take theatre seriously.” Two weeks later, however, he wrote Langner that he’d begun “working again on something … after a lapse of several months spent with an ear glued to the radio for war news. You can’t keep a hop head off his dope for long!”266 His first diary note for the play, June 1939, reads, “The Jimmy the P.—H. H.—Garden idea.” Below that, he jotted, recalling a play idea from as far back as 1927, “and N.L. [New London] family one”—what was to become Long Day’s Journey Into Night.267
Even while O’Neill surrendered himself to nostalgia with The Iceman Cometh and the “New London family” idea, he’d barred any of his children from a place in the New London family plot. “I am the last of this pure Irish branch of the O’NEILLS,” he wrote Harry Weinberger. “My children are a weird mixture, racially speaking,—and I certainly would rather be thrown down the sewer than be planted in New London. I want to be buried wherever my home happens to be when I die.” A new headstone that he’d ordered for his family was to list the names from top to bottom, from James to Ella’s mother, Bridget Quinlan, following the “pattern of a cast of characters in a play, which is absolutely appropriate for an actor’s family.”268
Sadly, by necessity this time, O’Neill ordered another tombstone when, on December 17, 1940, Blemie, the O’Neills’ beloved Dalmatian of thirteen years, who’d accompanied them from France to New York, Georgia to Seattle, and San Francisco to Danville, died a lingering, painful death at Tao House. For a very long time, O’Neill and Monterey were inconsolable.
Saxe Commins remembered the special attention heaped upon the dog during one of his stays at Casa Genotta: “A Dalmatian of aristocratic canine lineage, idolized and pampered by Carlotta and protected by Gene. Blemie’s food was shipped from New York after consultation with animal dieticians. Special steel instruments were made for scaling tartar from his teeth. He slept in a made-to-order bed. … Sheets on this bed were changed at frequent intervals and a monogrammed blanket was provided for his comfort.” “Gene & I spoil him to no end,” Monterey admitted to Commins’ wife, Dorothy, “but always say he is the only one of our children who has not disillusioned us—& seemed always conscious (& grateful) of our effort to do all we could for his welfare & happiness!!”269 Blemie’s bed at Tao House had been upgraded to a four-poster with linens and blankets, and his own bathtub was installed in the basement. (The contractor said this was the most expensive item in the house, since it required its own plumbing system.)270
On December 26, O’Neill memorialized his adored pet with “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill,” a poignant reflection on the distinctions between the inner world of dogs and that of human beings. Unlike humans, he wrote in Blemie’s voice, dogs don’t waste their lives hoarding material things and obsessing over their ownership; and rather than fearing death in the mode of humans, “as something alien and terrible which destroys life,” dogs “accept it as part of life.”271 The Dalmatian’s headstone on the hill above Tao House reads, “Sleep in Peace, Faithful Friend.” Soon after Blemie died, O’Neill said, “Everything has gone wrong.”272
The Tyranny of Time
His dog was dead; his hand tremors had worsened; his marriage was not going well; and his despair over the escalating world war had reached its lowest ebb. Together, these crises forced O’Neill to acknowledge to himself that he was running out of time. But to write effectively, he had to conquer his enduring malaise of creative spirit, in which “my only thought about the Art of the Drama is Fuckit!”273
“I cannot believe the Cycle matters a damn,” he conceded before abandoning it altogether, “or could mean anything to any future I can foresee.” “At this time,” he said, “when perhaps there is so little time left for the free writer even in this country—it seems the only wisdom is to concentrate on what is most important and get as much as I can write written.”274 What turned out to be “most important” was obvious to him, a play idea about his family that had been haunting him at least since 1927, much earlier when one takes into account its echoes in virtually everything he’d written up to then.
By the summer of 1941, with the assistance of a custom-made back brace to steady him while he wrote, O’Neill completed his four-act autobiographical masterwork Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “When he started Long Day’s Journey,” Monterey remembered of this distressing time, “it was a most strange experience to watch that man being tortured every day by his own writing. He would come out of his study at the end of a day gaunt and sometimes weeping. His eyes would be all red and he looked ten years older than when he went in in the morning.”275
Long Day’s Journey takes place over a single day in August 1912, in the living room of Monte Cristo Cottage in New London. The Tyrone family of the play, based on his actual family, James, Ella, James Jr., and himself, acts out an often vicious blame game, in spite of their mutual love, over the course of which an audience begins to recognize, as he wrote in his work diary, “shifting alliances in battle”: “Father, two sons versus Mother; Mother, two sons versus Father; Father, younger son versus Mother, older son; Mother, younger son versus Father, older son; Father and Mother versus two sons; Brother versus brother; Father versus Mother.”276 The Tyrones habitually suppress their emotional pain by condemning the others; and when that fails, they turn to stimulants—Mary to morphine, James to real estate, Edmund to poetry written by “whoremongers and degenerates” (CP3, 799), Jamie to the comfort of overweight prostitutes, and all three men to whiskey. But then, once they realize the impotence of stimulants and sex to provide a refuge from their constant suffering, they return to their living room to do battle.
Each of the Tyrones betrays noticeable Irish characteristics—lyrical language; quick mood reversals; physical features (“Keep your dirty tongue off Ireland!” James Tyrone shouts at Jamie. “You’re a fine one to sneer, with the map of it on your face!” [CP3, 732].); whiskey drinking; the sympathy with the tenant farmer Shaughnessy (based on John “Dirty” Dolan) over the Protestant Standard Oil magnate Harker (Edward S. Harkness), and thus their struggle deciding between a “lace curtain” or “shanty” Irish identity; James’s notion that Edmund’s “self-destruction” stems from his denial of “the one true faith of the Catholic church” (CP3, 759); James’s terror of tuberculosis as inevitably lethal and not worth facing poverty over; and Mary’s distinctive place as the center of it all, thereby making her accusations the most hurtful.
Overarching everything in Long Day’s Journey is the horrifying surety of a wasted past. James and Mary, along with their dissipated elder son Jamie, present two selves—the selves that might have achieved their potential and the selves they’ve been fated to endure. As well as his tuberculosis, Edmund discovers his own tragic core in the fact that he was ever “born a man”: “I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” (CP3, 812). “At the final curtain,” O’Neill explained after its completion, “there they still are, trapped within each other by the past, each guilty and at the same time innocent, scorning, loving, pitying each other, understanding and yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget.”277
Only O’Neill’s most trusted friends were permitted to read Long Day’s Journey during his lifetime. Sophus Winther and his wife, Eline, read it while they were houseguests at Tao House in 1943. Stunned by the power of the play and its astonishing personal revelations, Winther recalled that, after he’d finished reading, O’Neill descended the stairs and said nothing to him at first. Then he gazed out the window at M
ount Diablo and slowly recited Mary Tyrone’s, and the play’s, final lines: “That was the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” Then, after a prolonged silence, O’Neill said, “I think that is the greatest scene I have ever written.”278
In the fall of 1941, a twenty-six-year-old Swedish actress playing Anna in a San Francisco production of “Anna Christie” was invited out to Tao House for a visit with her character’s maker. Monterey had seen her perform that August and approved: “[She] was excellent when she had to dig in and work,” she said, “at all times, I felt her the woman, not an actress acting! … None of these damned silly affectations!”279
Ingrid Bergman, the actress playing Anna and soon to be regarded by legions of filmgoers as the most beautiful woman in the world, always remembered the first time she saw O’Neill: “He came toward me, and there was a silence about him that was so effective. It was the stillness that impressed me. One hardly dared to speak to him. Then, as he came closer, I saw those eyes. They were the most beautiful eyes I have seen in my whole life. They were like wells; you fell into them. You had the feeling that he looked straight through you.”280
Under Monterey’s disapproving glare, O’Neill led Bergman upstairs and showed her the Cycle laid out in piles. He told Bergman he wanted her to join the company that would perform all of the plays. With her heart set on the movies, Bergman refused. (That spring, 1942, Bergman began filming Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart.) “You’re abandoning me,” he said when she told him no. “Not really,” she replied. “Perhaps some other time. Maybe later.”281
A year and a half later, on February 21, 1943, O’Neill would destroy two longhand drafts of More Stately Mansions, along with drafts of other plays meant for the Cycle. The surviving typescript of Mansions includes a note: “Unfinished Work. This script to be destroyed in case of my death! [signed] Eugene O’Neill.” But in fact Bergman did accept the role of Deborah Harford for its 1967 premiere, after the script was discovered and the play produced, against his expressed wish.
Eugene O’Neill at Tao House.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
In 1951, O’Neill and Monterey inadvertently sent the existing typescript of More Stately Mansions to Yale with the rest of O’Neill’s papers. Swedish director Karl Ragnar Gierow of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm became aware of the script in 1957, four years after O’Neill’s death, and Monterey gave him permission to shorten the length from ten hours of playing time to four. Gierow produced its world premiere in Stockholm on November 9, 1962. That production received strong reviews, but the play’s American premiere, directed by the future O’Neill impresario José Quintero with Bergman as Deborah and Colleen Dewhurst as Sara, at the Broadhurst Theatre on October 31, 1967, and then Los Angeles, was unreservedly panned: “In its unfinished, raw and tortured state,” wrote Clive Barnes in the New York Times, “it does, in my view, O’Neill’s memory a disservice. With friends like Mr. Quintero, the shade of O’Neill might think he needs no enemies, and being his own worst enemy was the privilege O’Neill always retained for himself.”282 Ingrid Bergman, then fifty-two, defended Quintero’s decision to see the recovered work onto the boards. “I thought it was important that the play had been found and that we were producing it. After all, O’Neill is one of America’s greatest playwrights. Even if More Stately Mansions is not his best play, it was written by a playwright who will go down in history as the greatest in America.”283
“It is like acid always burning in my brain,” O’Neill, furious over the war, wrote Eugene in June of 1942, “that the stupid butchering of the last war taught men nothing at all, that they sank back listlessly on the warm manure pile of the dead and went to sleep, indifferently bestowing custody on their future, their fate, into the hands of State departments, whose members are trained to be conspirators, card sharps, double-crossers and secret betrayers of their own people; into the hands of greedy capitalist ruling classes so stupid they could not even see when their own greed began devouring itself; into the hands of that most debased type of pimp, the politician, and that most craven of all lice and job-worshippers, the bureaucrats. … I could go on from there, extensively and eloquently, and give you an Anarchist diatribe against the State which, published, would earn me fifty years in Leavenworth—or deportation to Ireland!”284
Feeling acutely helpless, O’Neill sketched out a couple of scenarios for propaganda plays, if for no other reason than to vent his frustration over the atrocities taking place across the globe.285 He asked Saxe Commins to send him a copy of Stirner’s The Ego and His Own to revisit philosophical anarchism, which validated his belief that any state, including his own, was capable of the kind of fiendishness Hitler was then inflicting on humanity. But he shelved these projects in deference to the war effort. “I censor myself,” he said. Instead, over three weeks’ time back in April 1941, he dashed off Hughie, a play “written more to be read than staged.”286
Hughie, O’Neill’s last one-act play and his first since Exorcism over two decades earlier, tells the sad tale of a washed-up gambler’s affection for the recently deceased desk clerk of a dingy fourth-rate hotel in Manhattan’s theater district. Set during what O’Neill refers to in his stage directions as “the Great Hollow Boom of the twenties” (CP3, 831), 1928, Hughie closely analyzes the inner and outer lives of the hotel’s new night clerk, Charlie (the listener), and the small-time Broadway hustler, Erie Smith (the talker). Erie finds meager solace in gambling and alcohol, short-term solutions to the long-term problems of isolation, alienation, and disillusionment. “The Night Clerk character,” he told George Jean Nathan, “is an essence of all the night clerks I’ve known in bum hotels—quite a few! ‘Erie’ is a type of Broadway sport I and my brother used to know by the dozen in far-off days. I didn’t know many at the time the play is laid, 1928, but they never change. Only their lingo does.”287
Hughie is the sole surviving installment of a planned series of one-acts titled “By Way of Obit.” “In each,” he told Nathan, “the main character talks about a person who has died to a person who does little but listen.”288 (O’Neill completed one other “By Way of Obit” play, involving an Irish chambermaid, but destroyed it on February 2, 1944, along with the scenarios for several others.)
For his next play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, another four-act tragedy, O’Neill journeyed back in his past to another wrenching episode in his own life, exorcising the haunting ghost of his older brother Jim once and for all. Originally, he’d intended the story as a full-length play about James O’Neill’s tenant John “Dirty” Dolan. Jim O’Neill was, in fact, Dolan’s landlord in October 1923, when the play takes place, a month before Jim would die of alcoholism in the New Jersey sanatorium. But the character Jim Tyrone, seemingly without his creator’s permission, before long stole the dialogue away, though not entirely, from the poor Irish farmer and his daughter, Josie Hogan.
O’Neill’s working title was “Moon of the Misbegotten,” “a good title,” he thought; but then he changed it to “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “much more to the point.”289 “Even in titles,” O’Neill said, “I have tried for that double meaning—which explains why many people, without realizing the reason, find a lot of them so striking. They hit the subconscious as well as the conscious.”290 For the Greeks, the moon symbolized Diana, goddess of the moon and chastity, for Christians, the Virgin Mary. The moon in the play thus presents Josie Hogan, based in large part on Jim O’Neill’s lover Christine Ell, as a harbinger of forgiveness and spiritual serenity for the misbegotten Jim Tyrone. O’Neill’s use of “misbegotten” refers to tragic souls whose lives are so tormented that they experience life as a kind of living death, as Jim does, and long for the peace death brings while wishing never to have been born at all. The culminating scene of the third act ends with Jim pa
ssed out from booze in Josie’s arms in an evocation of the Pietà. After a year of self-loathing following Jim’s betrayal of his mother, his longing for the peace, security, and sense of belonging only a mother can provide has been fulfilled at long last.
O’Neill was laboring through the second act of A Moon for the Misbegotten when the Japanese attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. “I had to drag myself through [the play] since Pearl Harbor,” he said months later, “and it needs much revision—wanders all over the place.”291 By New Year’s, 1942, he’d completed a draft; he finished it, as well as his tremor permitted, the following year. It was the last play O’Neill would ever write.
Along with millions of other Americans, O’Neill and Monterey sat by their radio for long, excruciating hours, stony-faced and despondent, as the war coverage poisoned the very air of their living room with news of the horrors of World War II. “The world drama you hear over the radio every day, or read in the papers,” he wrote George Jean Nathan, “is the one important drama of the moment, and one can’t write anything significant about that because it’s too close and the best one could do wouldn’t be half as effective as a good war correspondent’s story of the front line.”292
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 49
