Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  4. Quoted in George Monteiro, “John Francis, Go-between for Provincetown and the Players,” Laconics 1 (2006), http://www.eoneill.com/library/laconics/1/1f.htm.

  5. Ernest L. Meyer, “The First Patron of Eugene O’Neill,” Column Review 5, no. 2 (1937): 2.

  6. Ibid., 2–3.

  7. Quoted in Monteiro, “John Francis.”

  8. Quoted in ibid.

  9. On the importance of Neith Boyce’s role in founding the Players, see Jeff Kennedy, “Probing Legends in Bohemia: The Symbiotic Dance between O’Neill and the Provincetown Players,” in Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives, and the Avant Garde, ed. Eileen Herrmann and Robert M. Dowling (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 163–64, as well as The Modern World of Neith Boyce: Autobiography and Diaries, ed. Carol DeBoer-Langworthy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

  10. Egan, Provincetown as a Stage, 14; Linda Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 162; Mary Heaton Vorse vastly overstated the dimensions of the fish house in her chronicle of the Players. The figures I use here are taken from Robert Karoly Sarlós’s careful estimations in his Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 201; Vorse, Time and the Town, 118; Sartós, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, 67.

  11. Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927), 253. In her record of this encounter, Glaspell goes on to say that she invited O’Neill and Carlin to their house that night, where the actor Frederick Burt read them Bound East for Cardiff. This is an inaccurate chronology of events, as it was The Movie Man O’Neill first read to the Players, and it was at Reed and Bryant’s house, not Glaspell and Cook’s. Deliberately or not, this inaccurate tale places Glaspell and Cook even more centrally in the legend of O’Neill’s discovery. When Glaspell’s book came out in 1927, O’Neill must have been delighted that his first disastrous night with the Players was, if only temporarily, struck from the historical record.

  12. George Frame Brown, interview by Louis Sheaffer, undated, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London. The fact that O’Neill brought a copy of Thirst is recorded in Harry Kemp, “George Cram Cook and the Provincetown Players,” Lorelei 1 (August 1924): 29–30.

  13. Hutchins Hapgood to Mabel Dodge, July 1, 1916, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven.

  14. Bernard Holm[illegible], “Irish Players Rebel and May Quit Abbey,” New York Review, July 1, 1916, 1. They did not, in the end, “collapse” once Ervine resigned. There’s a Yeats letter pertaining to Ervine’s resignation in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. The dispute revolved around a leading lady named Marie O’Neill who felt she needed more time for rehearsals. Ervine demanded they rehearse twice a day. The Abbey Players were in no mood to oblige and walked out on him.

  15. Egan, Provincetown as a Stage, xi. See Linda Ben-Zvi, “The Provincetown Players: The Success That Failed,” Eugene O’Neill Review 27 (2005): 15; Cheryl Black, “Pioneering Theatre Managers: Edna Kenton and Eleanor Fitzgerald of the Provincetown Players,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Fall 1997): 58; George Cram Cook, “The Way of the Group,” Little Theatre Review, November 18, 1920. See also George Cram Cook, [The Emperor Jones, by Eugene O’Neill], [1920], p. 3, unsigned MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, New York; Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 119.

  16. Vorse, Time and the Town, 122; Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper, 1948), 564–65.

  17. Marsden Hartley, “The Great Provincetown Summer,” MS, Yale Collection of American Literature.

  18. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 565; Louise Bryant, “Christmas in Petrograd 1917,” corrected TS, n.d., p. 7, Granville Hicks Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, N.Y.

  19. Bryant, “Christmas in Petrograd 1917.”

  20. This is according to Susan Glaspell, Mary Heaton Vorse, Harry Kemp, Marsden Hartley, and other Provincetown Players in their reminiscences.

  21. Egan, Provincetown as a Stage, 203; Marsden Hartley, “Farewell, Charles,” in The New Caravan, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Norton, 1936), 556; Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 53.

  22. Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story: “Eugene O’Neill as a Young Man in Love,” ed. William Davies King (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 162; Louis Sheaffer, Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 338; 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.

  23. See Robert M. Dowling, “‘The Screenews of War’: A Previously Unpublished Short Story by Eugene O’Neill,” Resources for American Literary Study 31 (Fall 2007): 174.

  24. This bizarre incident has been dramatized as And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), with Antonio Banderas as Pancho Villa and Matt Day as John Reed.

  25. Quoted in Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 324.

  26. Gary Jay Williams identifies the date as most likely July 17 (Gary Jay Williams, “Turned Down in Provincetown: O’Neill’s Debut Re-Examined,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 [1985]: 158).

  27. Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95; Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 254.

  28. Adele Nathan, “‘Eugene G. O’Neill’: 1916,” New York Times, October 6, 1946, SM18; Williams, “Turned Down in Provincetown,” 161.

  29. Vorse, Time and the Town, 116–17.

  30. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 566.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Harry Kemp, “O’Neill of Provincetown,” Brentano’s Book Chat, May–June 1929, 45–47.

  33. 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), 97.

  34. Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 110–12, 400.

  35. Hutchins Hapgood, “Memories of a Determined Drinker; or, Forty Years of Drink” (1932), MS, Hapgood Family Papers, Beinecke Library.

  36. Quoted in Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1947), 31.

  37. Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 397.

  38. Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, 169.

  39. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 133; Kemp, “Out of Provincetown,” 96–97.

  40. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: Movers and Shakers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 484.

  41. Hapgood, “Memories.”

  42. Ibid., 69.

  43. Vorse, Time and the Town, 122.

  44. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 388.

  45. Quoted in “The Provincetown Players: A Theatrical Workshop for Acting Playwrights and Play-Writing Actors,” Current Opinion 61 (July–December 1916): 323.

  46. Paul Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant: New Documents,” Eugene O’Neill Review 27 (2005): 39n1; and Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 202–3.

  47. Brenda Murphy argues that rather than O’Neill and Bryant’s affair, The Eternal Quadrangle more directly corresponds to Reed’s passionate affair with Mabel Dodge, apparently conducted with the blessing of her wealthy husband, Edwin Dodge. See Murphy
, Provincetown Players, 61–64.

  48. O’Neill is wearing the same sweater, the same wisp of hair over his forehead. His knees are in the same position.

  49. I would like to thank Professors Jackson R. Bryer and Patrick Chura for their input on the photograph. Thanks also to the artist Michael J. Peery for acting as a proxy for facial recognition software in the first stages of authentication. I realized that this photograph, which was wrongly identified at the Berg as being O’Neill and Elaine Freeman, was O’Neill and Bryant on January 18, 2013.

  50. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 53.

  51. The complete poem can be found in Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 31.

  52. Quoted in Murphy, Provincetown Players, 95.

  53. Quoted in Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 53.

  54. Quoted in Murphy, Provincetown Players, 95.

  55. Quoted in Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 53.

  56. Quoted ibid., 54.

  57. Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (New York: Applause, 2000), 573.

  58. Quoted in ibid., 562.

  59. Quoted in “Provincetown Players,” 323.

  60. Quoted in Kenton, Provincetown Players, 25.

  61. O’Neill destroyed the revised version of The Movie Man, but I found the surviving copy of the short story and published it in 2007. See Dowling, “‘The Screenews of War.’”

  62. Louis Sheaffer specifies that the visit lasted only “a few days” (Son and Playwright, 360). Whether that count is accurate is unclear; regardless, it was a long enough stay for Jessica Rippin to recall his and Bryant’s visit and for him to have written a story for which the plot had already been outlined in dramatic form; Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 65.

  63. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 360.

  64. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 59.

  65. Barney Gallant to Louis Sheaffer, November 13, 1957 (photocopy), private collection of Jackson R. Bryer.

  66. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 371.

  67. Clayton [Meeker] Hamilton, “Eugene G. O’Neill,” Ninth Lecture at Columbia University, April 7, 1924, in Conversations on Contemporary Drama (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 206.

  68. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, October 17, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  69. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 41; Anna Alice Chapin, Greenwich Village (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), 226. The Samovar closed when Nani Bailey signed on as a nurse and went overseas during World War I; she died in France (Kenton, Provincetown Players, 42).

  70. Mary Heaton Vorse, “Eugene O’Neill’s Pet Saloon Is Gone,” New York World, May 4, 1930, M7.

  71. Sarlós, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, 80; George Cram Cook to Susan Glaspell, December 23, 1916, copy, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  72. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 240.

  73. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 79; Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 589; “O’Neill as an Actor is Recalled by One Who Saw Him in ’17,” New York Herald Tribune, March 17, 1929, sec. 7, 5.

  74. Quoted in Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 588.

  75. William Carlos Williams to Louis Sheaffer, n.d., Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  76. Hapgood, Victorian, 399.

  77. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 65; see Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays, 122, 127. For the correct date of Ella’s mastectomy, see Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 502n.

  78. Patrick Chura, “Bryant, Louise,” in Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, ed. Robert M. Dowling (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 2:540; Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 60–61.

  79. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 598–99; Kenton, Provincetown Players, 51. The other two plays on the “war bill” were Ivan’s Homecoming by Irwin Granich (Mike Gold) and Barbarisms by Rita Wellman.

  80. Nina Moise, “A Note to Edna Kenton about the Provincetown Players,” in Kenton, Provincetown Players, 181.

  81. William Davies King, Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 120. (Harold de Polo signed his name with two words and a lowercase “d,” though he is mostly referred to in previous scholarship with the spelling “DePolo.”)

  82. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 380; Charles A. Merrill, “Eugene O’Neill, World-Famous Dramatist, and Family Live in Abandoned Coast Guard Station on Cape Cod” (1923), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 43; [untitled], Provincetown Advocate, March 28, 1917; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 154.

  83. Vorse, Time and the Town, 131.

  84. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 381.

  85. Virginia Floyd, ed., Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for His Plays (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 305.

  86. Robert A. Richter, Eugene O’Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea: Maritime Influences in the Life and Works of Eugene O’Neill (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 2004). Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 395.

  87. Bryant, “Christmas in Petrograd 1917”; Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 65, 67.

  88. Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 80.

  89. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 392; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 79; Bryant, “Christmas in Petrograd 1917”; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 78.

  90. Eugene O’Neill to Elaine Freeman, September 1917, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 128.

  91. Mabel Collins, Light on the Path (1885) (Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press Online, n.d.), http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/lightpat/lightpat.htm. See also J. Shantz, “Carlin, Terry,” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:543–44. O’Neill frequently misspelled “it’s” for “its,” which leads me to believe after seeing a photograph of the rafters that he was the one who painted these words.

  92. Eugene O’Neill to Elaine Freeman, September 19, 1917, and September [no day], 1917, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

  93. Charles Demuth, Letters of Charles Demuth, American Artist, 1883–1935, ed. Bruce Kellner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 26; Eugene O’Neill to Elaine Freeman, September [no day], 1917; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 410; Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 34.

  94. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia, 74; Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 38.

  95. The depth of her relationship with O’Neill remains a mystery, though a Catholic friend of hers late in life, the novelist Joseph Dever, reported, significantly while they were still in communication, “It is fairly well known that, as a budding young dramatist, Gene O’Neill was the lover of the then Bohemian, but now austere and saintly Dorothy Day” (Joseph Dever, Cushing of Boston: A Candid Portrait [Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1965], 282).

  96. 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.; Dorothy Day, interview by Louis Sheaffer, n.d., Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  97. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (New York: Harper, 1952), 84. See also Eileen J. Herrmann, “Saints and Hounds: Modernism’s Pursuit of Dorothy Day and O’Neill,” in Herrmann and Dowling, Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries, 210–33.

  98. Dorothy Day, interview by Sheaffer.

  99. Day, Long Loneliness, 84.

  100. Ibid., 84; Day, “Told in Context.”

  101. Day, “Told in Context”; Dorothy Day, interview by Sheaffer.

  102. Dorothy Day, interview by Sheaffer.

  103. Day, “Told in Context”; Maxwell Bodenheim, “Eugene O’Neill: Portrayed in Bold Relief,” Lorelei 1 (August 1924): 14.

  104. Kenton, Provincetown Players
, 73.

  105. “Who Is Eugene O’Neill?” New York Times, November 4, 1917, 7; Lewis Sherwin, “The Theatre: The Washington Square Players at the Comedy,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, November 1, 1917, 14.

  106. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 89.

  107. Black, Eugene O’Neill, 201.

  108. “James Light Dies; O’Neill Associate,” New York Times, February 12, 1964; “Who’s Who,” New York Times, February 8, 1925, sec. X, 2.

  109. Ralph Block, “The Provincetown Players Reopen in Macdougal Street,” New York Tribune, November 3, 1917, 13; “New Plays in New York: Eugene O’Neill, Notable Young Playwright,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 8, 1917, 16; Kenton, Provincetown Players, 63; Hamilton, “Eugene G. O’Neill,” 211–12; “Village Players Present Best Bill,” Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, April 22, 1918, 9.

  110. Eugene O’Neill to Maxwell Bodenheim, July 5, 1923, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  111. Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 35, 37, 38. The word “romance” is likely but questioned by Roazen in brackets (35).

  112. King, Another Part of a Long Story, 6.

  113. Ibid., 67; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 16.

  114. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 19; King, Another Part of a Long Story, 67.

  115. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 29, 21.

  116. Ibid., 27, 31, 67.

  117. Ibid., 76. The italics are Boulton’s.

  118. Virginia Gardner, “Friend and Lover”: The Life of Louise Bryant (New York: Horizon, 1982), 129.

  119. Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 36.

  120. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 60, 61, 57.

  121. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 408.

  122. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 76.

  123. Ibid., 77.

  124. Ibid., 78, 38.

  125. For a list of differing accounts, see Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 410. Dorothy Day said it was the waiter, and I believe her account is the most credible.

  126. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 79.

  127. Carlotta Monterey Diary, September 24, 1944, O’Neill Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven.