128. Ibid., 80.
129. Ibid., 81.
130. Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 38, 37. O’Neill wrote Bryant a series of final letters that her second husband, William C. Bullitt, later claimed Bryant had burned. Scholar Paul Roazen brought them to light in 2004, however, after Bullitt’s papers were gifted to Yale University by Bryant and Bullitt’s daughter Anne (30).
131. Quoted in Patrick Chura, “O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and the ‘Strange Marriage’ of Louise Bryant,” Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008): 8–9.
132. Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 38.
133. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 85.
134. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 375.
135. Ibid. O’Neill took The Rope from a scenario entitled “The Reckoning.” In 1924, Boulton and O’Neill later expanded this idea together into a four-act play, “The Guilty One,” which was never published or produced.
136. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 81.
137. Ibid., 82.
138. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 91, 96n12.
139. Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene G. O’Neill, County Clerk’s Index #1673, Supreme Court, Westchester County, Westchester County Clerk’s Office, White Plains, N.Y., 1912. The earlier “Interlocutory Judgment” of July 5, signed by Judge Joseph Morschauser, stipulated that O’Neill could remarry but only “by express permission of this court.”
140. An incomplete file, which includes the judge’s order, is in O’Neill’s papers at the Beinecke Library.
141. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 167; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 145; Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 66; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 145.
142. It’s likely that O’Neill received another inspiration from the boy: the name of his character Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh.
143. 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), 74.
144. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 66.
145. Quoted in “A Letter from O’Neill,” New York Times, April 11, 1920.
146. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 422.
147. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 111, 96.
148. Ibid., 113.
149. Ibid., 116.
150. Agnes Boulton misquotes the lines from Light on the Path on p. 118 of her memoir, Part of a Long Story, and she could not remember the source.
151. Ibid., 149.
152. Quoted in Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, 205.
153. Quoted in Virginia Floyd, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), 154.
154. Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant,” 36.
155. King, Another Part of a Long Story, 252n24.
156. Harold de Polo to Henry W. Wenning, February 2, 1960, p. 1, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
157. Ibid.
158. Eugene O’Neill to Sidney Howard, September 27, 1936, and November 26, 1936, Sidney Coe Howard Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
159. Harold de Polo, MS, “The Screenews of War,” January 30, 1960, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
160. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 163, 191, 161n.
161. Ibid., 153.
162. A Theatre for America: Concerning the Provincetown Playhouse, That Famous Little Theatre, Which Has Given Americans the Best of American Drama and Many Noted Stage Personalities (New York: Provincetown Playhouse Guild Association, ca. 1934), 1 (ten-page pamphlet at the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature); Eleanor M. Fitzgerald, “Valedictory of an Art Theatre,” New York Times, December 22, 1929, in Kenton, Provincetown Players, 198; Jeff Kennedy, “Provincetown Playhouse, The (Playwrights’ Theatre),” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:715.
163. Quoted by Gilbert Seldes, “Radio and Television in the Courtroom,” September 7, 1954, The Lively Arts, WNYC, WNYC archives id.: 71485, New York City Municipal archives id.: LT3109, http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lively-arts-the/1954/sep/.
164. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 81.
165. W. Livingston Larned, “Below Washington Square,” New York Review, November 25, 1916, 4. In this article, one of Larned’s associates in the Village is a young man who “paints backgrounds in figure compositions for a large publishing house”; this is most likely Donald Corley, the Provincetown Player who painted “Here Pegasus Was Hitched” and worked, among other jobs, as a pattern maker. Corley later designed camouflage for soldiers’ uniforms during World War I; Larned became a minor celebrity for his short piece of parenting advice, “Father Forgets,” which was widely circulated, translated into many languages, and eventually reprinted in Dale Carnegie’s 1936 best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People.
166. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 198; Kennedy, “Provincetown Playhouse,” 2: 715. Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931), 43.
167. See note 78, above. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 186–88.
168. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 82.
169. Ibid., 83, 82.
170. Quoted in Bogard, Contour in Time, 103.
171. Heywood Broun, “Drama,” New York Tribune, November 25, 1918, 9.
172. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 63.
173. The following spring, 1919, the play appeared in O’Neill’s second book, “The Moon of the Caribbees” and Six Other Plays of the Sea.
174. Quoted in Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random House, 2002), 176. This is also mentioned in a letter from Kyra Markham to Louis Sheaffer, September 6, 1962 (photocopy), private collection of Jackson R. Bryer.
175. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 395; “Greenwich Village Sees New Dramas a la Provincetown,” New York Herald, December 21, 1918, 8; David Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine,” New York Herald Tribune, August 8, 1926, sec. 8, 6.
176. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 237n31, 229.
177. Ibid., 232.
178. Ibid., 224.
179. Stark Young, interview by Louis Sheaffer, n.d., Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
180. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 102.
181. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 90, 137.
182. Pierre Loving, “Eugene O’Neill,” Bookman, August 1921, 511.
183. Initially, O’Neill spelled his name Christophersen with an “e,” indicating Danish rather than Swedish heritage, but later corrected the mistake.
184. Quoted in Hamilton Basso, “The Tragic Sense—II,” New Yorker, March 6, 1948, 38.
185. Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays, 21.
186. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 254–57.
187. O’Neill’s work diaries indicate that he wrote this play at the end of 1919 in a “Rented House, Provincetown” (Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 390).
188. Eugene O’Neill, Exorcism: A Play in One Act (1919) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 55.
189. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 4.
190. Kenneth Macgowan, “The New Plays: The Provincetown Players, Reopening, Present One Real Oddity in Their New Bill,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, November 3, 1919, 12.
191. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 97.
192. William Davies King, ed., “A Wind Is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 115; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 151.
193. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 103.
194. Ibid., 98, 205.
195. Ibid., 99, 98.
196. “Three Are Held in the Fake Rum Sale,” New York Sun, December 29, 1919, 4; “61 Are Dead from Poison Whiskey Made in New York,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 28, 1919, 1.
197. O’Neill,
Selected Letters, 105; King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 78; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 106.
198. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 99, 100.
199. Ibid., 105.
200. Eugene O’Neill, [untitled poem] (1919), in Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 92. In their note on this poem in O’Neill, Selected Letters, Bogard and Bryer identify it as written on the morning of January 17, 1920. The date in Gallup reads “September 1919,” but it was added in pencil “in an unidentified hand.” In fact, Agnes Boulton quotes the poem in her memoir (Part of a Long Story, 260–61) and says O’Neill sent it to her in September while she was pregnant with Shane at Happy Home. I believe Bogard and Bryer are correct and that Agnes or someone else added the date to match her memoir, possibly to protect him from the above story or from Exorcism, the likely gift to her that goes unmentioned in her memoirs.
201. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 109, 108.
202. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 91.
203. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 111.
204. Yonkers Statesman, January 27, 1920, 3; “Beyond the Horizon,” Yonkers Statesman, February 3, 1920, 5.
205. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 112; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 477.
206. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 96 (of course, this wire was all in capital letters and used no italics or punctuation), 95, 96, 128.
207. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 112; Alexander Woollcott, “The Play: Eugene O’Neill’s Tragedy,” New York Times, February 4, 1920, 12; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 119.
208. Philip Mindil, “Behind the Scenes” (1920), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 5; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 129n1, 130.
209. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 95, 90n2; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 108.
210. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 120; Basso, “The Tragic Sense—II,” 35; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 137.
211. St. John Ervine to Eugene O’Neill, February 18, 1920, Eugene O’Neill Papers, Beinecke Library. O’Neill misquotes Ervine in a letter to Boulton; see King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 123. Much later, in 1948, St. John Ervine wrote an eviscerating anonymous review in England of The Iceman Cometh titled “Counsels of Despair,” in which he declaimed that “all of [O’Neill’s] plays are contemptuous of people and denunciatory of human existence.” [St. John Ervine] (1948), in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 369.
212. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 123.
213. Alta May Coleman, “Personality Portraits: No. 3, Eugene O’Neill,” Theatre Magazine, April 1920, 264, 302.
214. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 116, 118; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 118.
215. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 143.
216. Ibid., 128, 120, 121.
217. Ibid., 103. O’Neill wrote Boulton in early December that he was going down to Macdougal Street “to submit my play.” The unnamed play in question is Exorcism.
218. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 117. This subtitle does not appear on the surviving manuscript.
219. Jeff Kennedy, “Exorcism: The Context, the Critics, the Creation, and Rediscovery,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 28–38.
220. Jasper Deeter, interview by Louis Sheaffer, November 10, 1962, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection. See also Robert M. Dowling, “Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism: The Lost Prequel to Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 1–12.
221. In the process of collecting all extant contemporary reviews for our volume Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), my coeditor Jackson R. Bryer and I found a total of five for Exorcism, the New York Clipper, the Quill, the New York Tribune, Variety, and the New York Times.
222. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 12.
223. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 118, 103, 113.
224. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 555.
225. Hamlin Garland, Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland, ed. Keith Newlin and Joseph B. McCullough (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 349, 277, 278.
226. Light, interview by Sheaffer, March 26, 1959.
227. Hamilton, “Eugene G. O’Neill,” 209, 205.
228. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 131, 132, 143.
229. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 23–24.
230. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 117.
231. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 132, 131.
232. Hazel Hawthorne Werner, “Recollections,” n.d., TS, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
233. Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 72; Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 532.
234. Cornel West refers to this as an “unmasking of civilization. “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.
235. The Emperor Jones was the first successful example of American expressionism. Scholar Keith Newlin credits Dreiser’s Laughing Gas as the first expressionistic play ever produced in the United States. See Keith Newlin, “Expressionism Takes the Stage: Dreiser’s ‘Laughing Gas,’” Journal of American Drama 4 (Winter 1992): 5–22.
236. James Light, “The Parade of Masks,” undated, T-Mss 2001-050, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library, New York.
237. See Robert M. Dowling, “On Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Philosophical Anarchism,’” Eugene O’Neill Review 29 (Spring 2007): 50–72.
238. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority (1844), trans. Steven T. Byington (New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907), 65, 153; emphasis added.
239. Eugene O’Neill, “The Silver Bullet,” MS, Eugene O’Neill Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collection, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.
240. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 73, 117, 124, 127.
241. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 206; “Eugene O’Neill Talks of His Own and the Plays of Others,” New York Herald Tribune, November 16, 1924, sec. 7–8, 14.
242. Dudley Murphy, who wrote the film script, specifies that it takes place “on the island of Haiti” (“The Emperor Jones” by Eugene O’Neill, Film Treatment, by Dudley Murphy, ca. 1929, p. 4, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature). Furthermore, to identify the island as Haiti in that political climate would have been damaging to his career, perhaps even dangerous. “We played Christophe,” DuBose Heyward told O’Neill, after writing the 1933 film script, “as close as we dared” (DuBose Heyward to Eugene O’Neill, July 29, 1933 [photocopy], private collection of Jackson R. Bryer). The actor James Earl Jones, who decades later, in 1964, played Brutus Jones, points out that it might have been safer for O’Neill to attack capitalism over imperialism, even at the height of the Red Scare in 1920: “If O’Neill set out to write a straight play about a deposed dictator from a Caribbean island, like Haiti, it might never have been produced. … Brutus Jones was the ultimate capitalist, the ultimate exploiter.” “And that’s not black,” the actor remarked, “that’s American” (quoted in Donald P. Gagnon, “‘You Needn’t Be Scared of Me!’ Joe Mott and the Politics of Isolation and Interdependence in The Iceman Cometh,” in Herrmann and Dowling, Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries, 156).
243. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 124–25.
244. Kennedy, “Provincetown Playhouse,” 715.
245. Tragically, the legendary dome didn’t survive New York University’s recent renovations at the Macdougal Street address. Presumably Cook’s dome is decomposing in a Staten Island or New Jersey landfill. My thanks to Jeff Kennedy for mentioning to me this all-too-true image of the dome’s fate. Jimmy Light published an article at the time of the production that remains the most vivid existing description of its design, construction, and ultimate purpose.
246. Light, “Parade of Masks,” 3.
247. James Light, “Lighting Effects: Secured by Use of ‘Dome’ Explained by James Light,” Billboard, December 4, 1920, 20. A portion of Jame
s Light’s description is misquoted in Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 61–62.
248. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 72. This drum technique was not unique, however. The American dramatist Austin Strong used virtually the same idea in his 1915 melodrama, The Drums of Oude (ibid.).
249. Kyra Markham to Louis Sheaffer, September 6, 1962 (photocopy), private collection of Jackson R. Bryer.
250. Quoted in Michael A. Morrison, “Emperors Before Gilpin: Opal Cooper and Paul Robeson,” Eugene O’Neill Review 33, no. 2 (2012): 171n7. Morrison’s account of casting the role of Brutus Jones is the most up-to-date and comprehensive.
251. “Paul Robeson,” New York Amsterdam News, January 8, 1930, 9.
252. Morrison, “Emperors Before Gilpin,” 165, 166.
253. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, May 21, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
254. Light, interview by Sheaffer, October 17, 1960.
255. “Paul Robeson,” 9; “How Negro Actor Got His Chance in Emperor Jones,” New York Tribune, November 28, 1920, 2.
256. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 144; Kenton, Provincetown Players, 126; Light, interview by Sheaffer, October 17, 1960.
257. Teddy Ballantine, interview by Louis Sheaffer, n.d., Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 170; S. J. Woolf, “Eugene O’Neill Returns After Twelve Years” (1946), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 172.
258. George Cram Cook, [The Emperor Jones, by Eugene O’Neill], 1, 2; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 142.
259. Quoted in Basso, “The Tragic Sense—II,” 37; Cook, “The Way of the Group.” See also Cook, [The Emperor Jones, by Eugene O’Neill], p. 4; Kenneth Macgowan, “Curtain Calls,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, March 16, 1922; “To Close the Sunday Theatre: Directors of the Provincetown Players Charged with Violating the Law,” New York Times, December 10, 1920.
260. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930) (New York: Da Capo, 1991), 183–85.
261. Mary Welch, “Softer Tones for Mr. O’Neill’s Portrait,” Theatre Arts 41, no. 5 (1957): 67–68.
262. Number of performances in Basso, “The Tragic Sense—II,” 37. List of New York theaters in “Charles Gilpin in the Bronx,” New York Amsterdam News, October 27, 1926, 10; also see O’Neill, Selected Letters, 170.
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