(PHOTO BY GJON MILI. COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
Long Day’s Journey Into Night was hailed as O’Neill’s magnum opus and Quintero’s production brilliant. The Daily News raved that the play “exploded like a dazzling sky-rocket over the humdrum of Broadway theatricals.” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times, “With the production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ the American theatre acquires size and stature.” Atkinson clarified that by “size” he didn’t mean the length of the play (over three hours) but rather O’Neill’s “conception of theatre as a form of epic literature.”39 The Broadway production alone ran for sixty-five weeks for a total of 390 performances and posthumously won O’Neill a Drama Critics Circle Award, an Outer Circle Award, a Tony Award, and his fourth Pulitzer Prize. Few artists, no matter their stature, had achieved this level of acclaim with a single work. O’Neill did so, implausibly, after having already won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“‘Long Day’s Journey’ is not a play,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune,
It is a lacerating round-robin of recrimination, self-dramatization, lies that deceive no one, confessions that never expiate the crime. Around the whiskey bottles and the tattered leather chairs and the dangling light-cords that infest the decaying summer home of the Tyrones (read O’Neills), a family of ghosts sit in a perpetual game of four-handed solitaire, stir to their feet in a danse macabre that outlines the geography of Hell, place themselves finally on an operating table that allows for no anesthetic. When the light fails, they are still—but not saved. … How has O’Neill kept self-pity and vulgarity and cheap bravado out of this prolonged, unasked-for, improbable inferno? Partly by the grim determination that made him a major dramatist: the insistence that the roaring fire he could build by grinding his own two hands together was the fire of truth. You can disbelieve, but you cannot deny him his heat, his absolute passion.40
Carlotta Monterey’s detractors, like her defenders, have been legion; but whatever her motives, the release of Long Day’s Journey proved to be exactly the right thing to do. O’Neill’s theatrical descendent Tony Kushner reminds us that Monterey’s “betrayal of his wishes must be seen by us as an act of beneficence. … He fell silent, isolated himself, withered and died. And rose again, almost immediately!”41 Indeed, with the Broadway premieres of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1957, A Touch of the Poet in 1958, Hughie in 1964, and More Stately Mansions in 1967, a full-scale Eugene O’Neill renaissance flourished for well over a decade. “The tallest skyscraper in New York,” hailed the Sunday Times of London in 1958, “is the reputation of Eugene O’Neill.”42
Just as he’d suspected all along: for all his hard work, misadventures, and suffering, there was a great deal to be said for being dead. O’Neill’s posthumous resurgence in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s set the stage for the theatrical innovations of new generations of American dramatists—Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Neil Simon, August Wilson, William Inge, Sam Shepard, Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet, Paula Vogel, John Patrick Shanley, Tony Kushner, David Henry Hwang, and so it goes. As time passes, O’Neill remains there among them, a ghost at the stage door.
Appendix
Selected Chronology of Works (Date Completed)
1913
A Wife for a Life
The Web
Thirst
Recklessness
Warnings
1914
Bread and Butter
Servitude
Fog
Bound East for Cardiff
Abortion
The Movie Man
1915
The Sniper
The Personal Equation
1916
Before Breakfast
Now I Ask You
“Tomorrow”
“The Screenews of War”
1917
Ile
The Long Voyage Home
The Moon of the Caribbees
In the Zone
S.O.S.
1918
Shell Shock
The Rope
Beyond the Horizon
The Dreamy Kid
Where the Cross Is Made
1919
Chris Christophersen
The Straw
Exorcism
1920
Gold
“Anna Christie”
The Emperor Jones
Diff’rent
1921
The First Man
The Hairy Ape
1922
The Fountain
1923
Welded
All God’s Chillun Got Wings
1924
Desire Under the Elms
1925
Marco Millions
The Great God Brown
1926
Lazarus Laughed
1927
Strange Interlude
1928
Dynamo
1931
Mourning Becomes Electra
1932
Ah, Wilderness!
1933
Days Without End
1939
More Stately Mansions
The Iceman Cometh
1941
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Hughie
1942
A Touch of the Poet
1943
A Moon for the Misbegotten
Notes
Prologue
1. Dorothy Day, “Told in Context,” ca. 1958, Dorothy Day Papers, series D-3, box 7, file 2, Special Collections and University Archives, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis.
2. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, August 14, 1962, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London.
3. Anna Alice Chapin, Greenwich Village (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), 237.
4. Croswell Bowen, “The Black Irishman” (1946), in O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 82.
5. Susan Glaspell, undated entry in notebook dated October 16, 1915, p. 20, Susan Glaspell Collection, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
6. A. J. Philpot, “Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown,” Boston Globe, August 27, 1916, SM9.
7. Quoted in Pierre Loving, “Eugene O’Neill,” Bookman, August 1921, 516.
8. Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 396.
9. Harry Kemp, “O’Neill of Provincetown,” Brentano’s Book Chat, May–June 1929, 45–47.
10. Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle (1942), ed. Adele Heller (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 120–21; Hutchins Hapgood to Mabel Dodge, July 1, 1916, Hapgood Family Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven.
11. Harry Kemp, “Out of Provincetown: A Memoir of Eugene O’Neill” (1930), in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 96.
12. Along with his caricatural portrayal of Mexicans in The Movie Man, O’Neill also employed “sight dialect,” for instance, foreign-looking spellings that match proper pronunciation: “happee” for “happy,” “crazee” for “crazy,” “angree” for “angry,” etc.
13. Frederick P. Latimer, “Eugene Is beyond Us,” (New London) Day, February 15, 1928, 6.
14. Kemp, “Out of Provincetown,” 96.
15. Vorse, Time and the Town, 121.
16. Kemp, “Out of Provincetown,” 96.
Introduction
1. Thomas Flanagan, “Master of the Misbegotten,” in There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History, ed. Christopher Cahill (New York: New York Revi
ew of Books, 2004), 41–61; Rohan Preston, “The Dean of Dysfunction,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 18, 2013, http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/stageandarts/187324901.html; Alan Dale, “O’Neill Play of Nine Acts and Six Hours Reviewed by Dale,” New York American, January 31, 1928, 9.
2. Eugene O’Neill to Mary Clark, August 5, 1923, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, in The Straw file, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London.
3. Eugene O’Neill to Mrs. Hills, March 21, 1925, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, in Desire Under the Elms file; Alta May Coleman, “Personality Portraits No. 3: Eugene O’Neill,” Theatre Magazine, April 1920, 264, 302. O’Neill used this exclamatory remark as an ironic mantra with which to get through difficult times.
4. Quoted in Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O’Neill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 310–11.
5. Quoted in Louis Sheaffer, Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 419; Eugene O’Neill, Complete Plays, 1913–1920, ed. Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1:647. Hereafter, unless otherwise indicated, all references to O’Neill’s plays will be to this three-volume edition (the second and third volumes are Complete Plays, 1920–1931, and Complete Plays, 1932–1943) and will be provided in text with volume and page number: for example, CP1, 647. The year that each play was completed will not be identified in parentheses as they are listed in the appendix.
6. Eugene O’Neill Theater Festival, October 17, 2009, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Waterford, Conn.
7. Laurie Metcalf and Nathan Lane, “Two Journeys into O’Neill, via E-Mail,” New York Times, June 14, 2012, AR7.
8. Helen Mirren, interview by Liane Hansen, “Helen Mirren, Acting Out as Tolstoy’s Wild Sofya,” Weekend Edition Sunday, January 17, 2010, NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122613323.
9. “Cornel West Commentary: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” The Tavis Smiley Show, November 26, 2003, NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1522880; T. C. Boyle, “Celtic Twilight: 21st-Century Irish Americans on Eugene O’Neill,” Drunken Boat #12, http://www.drunkenboat.com/db12/04one/boyle/index.php.
10. Sinclair Lewis, “Nobel Prize Lecture: The American Fear of Literature,” December 12, 1930, Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/lewis-lecture.html.
11. “Eugene O’Neill Talks of His Own and the Plays of Others,” New York Herald Tribune, November 16, 1924, sec. 7–8, 14; FBI memorandum, April 22, 1924 (obtained by the author through the Freedom of Information Act). The Bureau also identified him as a possible contributing editor in 1919 at poet Hart Crane’s magazine the Pagan, which advanced individual happiness as a societal good. (That the pursuit of happiness was considered a radical philosophy is a sign of his times if there ever was one.) There is an “E. O’Neil” listed as an associate editor in the journal; ironically, the only item attributable to O’Neill (titled “Post-Lude” and appearing in volume 4, issue 1) is a few lines signed “A. Pagan Knight,” in which he accuses a New York playhouse of peddling “propaganda.”
12. FBI memorandum, April 22, 1924. This wasn’t the last time O’Neill’s name passed across a federal agent’s desk. The New London Day reported as late as 1996 that the domestic eco-terrorist Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, a.k.a. “the Unabomber,” had applied $1 O’Neill commemorative stamps to package bombs designed to kill the addressee. After this breakthrough in the high-profile case, the FBI opened a file titled “Eugene O’Neill” and another on the Eugene O’Neill Society, which contained directories of its members from 1979 to 1992. Remnants of O’Neill stamps were found at five crime scenes associated with Kaczynski’s years-long rampage, including his first attack, at Northwestern University in 1978. The FBI was tracking a bogus scent, however: in Kaczynski’s handwritten response (May 20, 2013) to my letter of inquiry, he called the FBI connection “bull manure.” “I’ve never had the faintest interest in Eugene O’Neill and I’ve never read anything by him, unless perhaps I was required to read something of his in a high-school English course, in which case I promptly forgot it.”
13. Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Grove, 1987), 228, 229.
14. Carol Bird, “Eugene O’Neill—The Inner Man” (1924), in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 52. Bird implies in her piece that the quotations are paraphrases, given O’Neill’s laconic responses to her questions.
15. Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 206.
16. Committee for Racial Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, “Eugene O’Neill Pledges No More of His Plays at National Theater unless Color Bar Is Dropped,” March 24, 1947, Rev. Wilfred Parsons, SJ, Papers, box 8, file 9, Georgetown University Library, Washington, D.C.
17. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 515.
18. Quoted in Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O’Neill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 313.
19. William Faulkner, “American Drama: Eugene O’Neill,” in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry (New York: Little, Brown, 1962), 87.
20. Stella Adler, On America’s Master Playwrights (New York: Knopf, 2012), 8.
21. James Light, “The Parade of Masks,” undated, T-Mss 2001–050, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.
22. Tony Kushner, “The Genius of O’Neill,” Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004): 248.
23. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 26.
24. Ibid., 545.
25. Ibid., 203.
ACT I: The Ghosts at the Stage Door
Notes to pp. 25–26: “that you write for the stupid” (Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 58); “What the American public always wants” (quoted in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography [New York: Harper and Row, 1975], 172); “This highest of distinctions” (Eugene O’Neill, “The Nobel Prize Acceptance Letter,” in The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished and Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 427).
1. Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (New York: Applause, 2000), 42.
2. “Talks with Actors: James O’Neill Relates Something of His Career—An Ambition to Get into the Legitimate: A Buffalo Boy Who Has Risen,” Buffalo Express, September 28, 1885, 5. This anecdote was circulated widely and can be found in numerous sources. James O’Neill himself quotes Neilson as saying this, referring to her as the “queen of the actresses,” in “James O’Neill,” Famous Actors of the Day in America (Boston: L. C. Page, 1899), 144. The full quotation reads: “Of all of the Romeos I have ever played with, a little Irishman named O’Neill, leading man in Chicago, was the best.”
3. Quoted in Hamilton Basso, “The Tragic Sense—I,” New Yorker, February 28, 1948, 34.
4. J. B. Russak, introduction to “Monte Cristo” by Charles Fechter and Other Plays, ed. J. B. Russak (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), 4.
5. Charles Webster, interview by Louis Sheaffer, October 28, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London.
6. James O’Neill believed he performed Monte Cristo six thousand times; though Louis Sheaffer argues in O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968, 42) that it was probably closer to four thousand total, James told a reporter that by 1901 he’d already performed it four thousand times (Frederic Edward McKay, “O’Neill as Monte Cristo to the Bitter End,” New York Morning Telegraph, April 1901, 2).
7. Charles Fechter, Monte Cristo (1870), in “Monte Cristo” by Charles Fechter and Other Plays, 38.
8. “Talks with Actors: James O’Neill.”
9. Fechter, Monte Cristo, 42.
10. Quoted in Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,�
�� 34–35.
11. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 44; McKay, “O’Neill as Monte Cristo to the Bitter End,” 2.
12. [No first name] Cheney, “Footlight Favorites … The Early Promise of James O’Neill, of ‘Monte Cristo’ Fame—a Promise Not Entirely Fulfilled,” St. Paul Sunday Globe, March 22, 1885, 9. The reporter also insinuates that James confessed a tragic end to his torrid affair with actress Louise Hawthorne in 1876 had exacted a heavy psychological toll, which might explain his self-removal from greatness. Hawthorne, who was married at the time, had followed James to Chicago and was staying at the Tremont Hotel. After his performance in the French melodrama The Two Orphans, which she attended, he apparently visited her room and broke off their relationship. “That interview must have been a stormy, crushing, heart-breaking affair,” the gossip mongering went on. “Five minutes after O’Neill bade Miss Hawthorne adieu, she sprang from the fifth story window and fell to her death on the pavement below.” “There are some events that murder a man’s ambition,” the reporter concluded, “and that terrible tragedy may have altered the whole course of O’Neill’s life. He alone can tell.”
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 55
