263. Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007), 640; R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 487.
264. “Charles Gilpin in the Bronx,” 10; “Ku Klux Bars Charles Gilpin from the South,” Chicago Broad Ax, January 28, 1922, 2.
265. Quoted in Hubert H. Harrison, “With the Contributing Editor: The Emperor Jones,” Negro World, June 4, 1921, 6.
266. “Provincetown Players Stage Remarkable Play,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 9, 1920, sec. 2, 5.
267. Quoted in Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 151. William Davies King, editor of the latest edition of Boulton’s memoir, notes that this section had been removed by the publishers. In his new edition, he restores the text, in brackets, for the first time (150–51).
268. Eugene O’Neill, [untitled poem], in Poems, 1912–1944, 77. Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, at only eighteen years old, published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” one of his most celebrated poems, the year after The Emperor Jones appeared. The poem echoes O’Neill’s atavistic meaning as well as referencing the riverbank—the Congo—upon which Brutus Jones is metaphorically slain. The Provincetown Players acknowledged the connection by reprinting Hughes’s poem in their program for the 1924 revival of The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson.
269. Harrison, “With the Contributing Editor.”
270. Note on the text by Jeffrey B. Perry in Hubert Harrison, A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffrey B. Perry (Watertown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 194.
271. Hubert H. Harrison, “Marcus Garvey at the Bar of United States Justice” (1923), in Perry, A Hubert Harrison Reader, 199.
272. Eugene O’Neill to Hubert H. Harrison, June 9, 1921, p. 1, Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893–1927, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.
273. Ibid., 2. It’s notable that O’Neill would use this line of dialogue, “Where do I go from here?” at the point of crisis in his next expressionistic play, The Hairy Ape, though he probably had already used it in the lost short story of that title.
274. Ibid., 1; Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 38.
275. Eugene O’Neill to Hubert H. Harrison, June 9, 1921, 1; quoted in Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 121.
276. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 184.
277. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 36.
278. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 185n1; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 165; Paul Robeson, “Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays,” in The “Opportunity” Reader: Stories, Poems, and Essays from the Urban League’s “Opportunity” Magazine, ed. Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 352; James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, June 26, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 177.
279. “Three Deaths,” New York Amsterdam News, May 14, 1930, 20.
280. Murphy, Provincetown Players, 178; Kenton, Provincetown Players, 155. Bryant would die at age forty-one alone in Paris. After her failed marriage to William C. Bullitt, she surrendered herself to alcohol and drugs while suffering from the body-deforming and agonizingly painful Dercum’s disease.
281. Djuna Barnes, “The Days of Jig Cook: Recollections of Ancient Theatre History But Ten Years Old,” Theatre Guild Magazine 6 (January 1929): 32.
282. Kenneth Macgowan, review of Diff’rent, in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 148; Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 79.
283. Heywood Broun, “Grey Gods and Green Goddesses,” Vanity Fair, April 1921, 98.
284. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 146.
285. Eugene O’Neill, “Damn the Optimists!” in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 104–6. This telling early statement by O’Neill was published in the New York Tribune, February 13, 1921, under the title “Eugene O’Neill’s Credo and His Reasons for His Faith.”
286. Stephen Rathbun, “O’Neill’s Latest Play Presented by the Provincetown Players,” New York Sun, December 31, 1920, 5.
287. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 146.
288. Heywood Broun, “Diff’rent Comes to Broadway at the Selwyn,” New York Tribune, February 1, 1921, 6.
289. Quoted in Egil Törnqvist, “Philosophical and Literary Paragons,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, ed. Michael Manheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22.
290. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 245.
291. Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924–1933 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 225, notes for p. 38.
292. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” January 20, 1925, Eugene O’Neill Papers.
293. Quoted in Törnqvist, “Philosophical and Literary Paragons,” 22.
294. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 38. O’Neill is responding to critics here about his later play Desire Under the Elms.
295. O’Neill, “Damn the Optimists!”
296. Dorothy Commins, ed., “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill-Commins Correspondence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 15; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 151.
297. George Jean Nathan, “The Bright Face of Tragedy,” Cosmopolitan, August 1957, 66.
298. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 171.
299. Ibid., 199.
300. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 17; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 156.
301. Quoted in Ronald H. Wainscott, Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 67.
302. Ibid., 69.
303. Ludwig Lewisohn, “Gold” (1921), in The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill, ed. John H. Houchin, Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, no. 5 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 26.
304. Quoted in George Jean Nathan, “Eugene O’Neill After Twelve Years” (1946), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 177.
305. [Heywood Broun], “Animadversion on the Great-Great-Grandchildren of Ophelia—Also Shaw’s Summary on Theater,” New York Tribune, June 5, 1921, part 3, 1; Heywood Broun, “Gold at Frazee Shows O’Neill Below His Best,” New York Tribune, June 2, 1921, 6.
306. Eugene O’Neill to Robert Sisk, March 11, 1929, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
307. Light, “Parade of Masks.”
308. Susan Glaspell, The Verge (1921), in Plays by Susan Glaspell, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65, 78, 82.
309. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 252n17.
310. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 48.
311. Quoted in Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 61.
312. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 48.
313. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 195–96.
314. Heywood Broun, “It Seems to Me,” New York World, November 11, 1921, 15.
315. James Whittaker, “O’Neill Has First Concrete Heroine,” New York Sunday News, November 13, 1921, 21.
316. Eugene G. O’Neill, “The Mail Bag,” New York Times, December 18, 1921, sec. Music-Drama, 72.
317. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 148.
318. Burns Mantle, “The New Plays: ‘Anna Christie’ Vivid Drama,” New York Evening Mail, November 3, 1921, 13; George Jean Nathan, “The Press and the Drama,” Smart Set 67 (January 1922): 132; Alexander Woollcott, “Second Thoughts on First Nights” (1921), in Houchin, The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill, 30.
319. See Katie N. Johnson, Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900–1920, Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
320. Kenneth Macgowan, “The New Play: Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Anna Christie’ a Notable Drama Notably Acted at the Vanderbilt Theatre,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, November 3, 1921, 16.
321. For a more comprehensive understanding of naturalism in drama, see my essay “Sad Endings and Negative Heroes: T
he Naturalist Tradition in American Drama” in The Oxford Handbook to American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 427–44.
322. Quoted in Louis Kantor, “O’Neill Defends His Play of the Negro” (1924), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 48.
323. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 121; Wainscott, Staging O’Neill, 92; Playgoer, “Eugene O’Neill’s The Straw Is Gruesome Clinical Tale” (1921), in Houchin, The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill, 38; Alan Dale, “Tuberculosis Dramatized in the Latest Play by Eugene O’Neill,” New York American, November 11, 1921; Light, interview by Sheaffer, May 21, 1960.
324. Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 102.
325. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 156.
326. Memorandum of Agreement on Eugene O’Neill, Jr., between Eugene O’Neill and Kathleen Jenkins, August 15, 1921, Eugene O’Neill Papers; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 65–67.
327. Charles Kennedy, “Several Sides of Mr. O’Neill,” Call Board (Official Organ of the Catholic Actors’ Guild of America), June 1948, 7.
328. Sotheby Parke-Bernet, catalogue of sales, January 26, 1977 (the eight-page, handwritten, signed letter sold on January 26, 1977). A copy of the page from this catalogue is in the private collection of Jackson R. Bryer. This would be one of the longest letters, perhaps the longest, that O’Neill ever wrote. One can only hope it resurfaces.
329. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 157; Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 20.
330. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 383.
331. Quoted in Malcolm Mollan, “Making Plays with a Tragic End: An Intimate Interview with Eugene O’Neill, Who Tells Why He Does It” (1922), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 15.
332. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 157, and quoted in Mollan, “Making Plays with a Tragic End,” 17.
333. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, 30; August Strindberg, “On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre” (1889), in August Strindberg: Selected Essays, ed. Michael Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 57, 59.
334. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 239.
335. Sophus Keith Winther, Eugene O’Neill: A Critical Study (New York: Random House, 1934), 123.
336. Tennessee Williams, “The World I Live In” (1957), in A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947), 184; quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 44.
337. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 20.
338. Oliver M. Sayler, “The Hairy Ape a Study in the Evolution of a Play: How O’Neill’s First Expressionistic Drama Took Form from the Experiment of The Emperor Jones,” New York Globe, May 6, 1922, 9.
339. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 161; Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 128; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 161.
340. George Jean Nathan. “Eugene O’Neill Is at Worst in His New Play, First Man,” Spokane Spokesman-Review, March 26, 1922, part 5, 2.
341. Quoted in Nathan, “Eugene O’Neill After Twelve Years,” 177.
342. Peter Egri, “‘Belonging’ Lost: Alienation and Dramatic Form in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,” in Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill, ed. James J. Martine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 77; Kenneth Macgowan, “The New Play: Eugene O’Neill Sets a New Mark in The Hairy Ape,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, March 10, 1922, 12.
ACT III: “The Broadway Show Shop”
Notes to pp. 239–30: “The greatest day of the Provincetown Players” (Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle [1942], ed. Adele Heller [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991], 125; “the throb of the drum” (John Dos Passos, “Is the ‘Realistic’ Theatre Obsolete? Many Theatrical Conventions Have Been Shattered by Lawson’s ‘Processional’” [1925], in Travel Books and Other Writings, 1916–1941, ed. Townsend Ludington [New York: Library of America, 2003], 593).
1. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, October 17, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, New London; Oliver M. Sayler, “The Hairy Ape a Study in the Evolution of a Play: How O’Neill’s First Expressionistic Drama Took Form from the Experiment of The Emperor Jones,” New York Globe, May 6, 1922, 9; Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 167.
2. 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), 182.
3. Cheryl Black, “Pioneering Theatre Managers: Edna Kenton and Eleanor Fitzgerald of the Provincetown Players,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9, no. 3 (1997): 46–47; Edna Kenton, The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915–1922, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), 156.
4. Arthur Pollock, “About the Theater,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 12, 1922, C7.
5. Eugene O’Neill to Robert Fisk, March 15, 1935, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; Keith Newlin and Frederic E. Rusch, introduction to The Collected Plays of Theodore Dreiser, ed. Newlin and Rusch (Albany, N.Y.: Whitston, 2000), xxvi. Dreiser’s full-length play The Hand of the Potter, a sympathetic treatment of a murderous child molester named Isadore Berchansky, based on the actual pedophilic murderer Nathan Swartz, had opened at the Provincetown Playhouse the previous December. Dreiser’s plotline horrified audiences. H. L. Mencken, best known for his defense of artistic freedom, scolded his friend Dreiser for “shocking the numskulls for the mere sake of shocking them” (xxvii).
6. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 87.
7. Ibid., 161; Alexander Woollcott, “The Play: Eugene O’Neill at Full Tilt,” New York Times, March 10, 1922, 18. The Wooster Group’s production of the early 1990s highlighted the industrial nightmare O’Neill conceived by constructing massive, cagelike scaffolding that allowed Yank, played with ferocious intensity by Willem Dafoe, to climb about with his coal-blackened face precisely resembling the primal ancestor O’Neill envisioned; Robert C. Benchley, “Drama,” Life, March 30, 1922, 18.
8. Yvonne Shaffer, Performing O’Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 25.
9. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, May 21, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
10. Oliver M. Sayler, “The Yarn-Spinning Provincetown,” ca. 1929, TS, Provincetown Players’ Scrapbook, 1923–1929, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.
11. Louis Wolheim, “A Prometheus of Modern Drama,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, September 24, 1922.
12. Ibid.
13. Quoted in Egil Törnqvist, A Drama of Souls: Studies in O’Neill’s Super-Naturalistic Technique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 14. Benjamin De Casseres refers to the vultures of O’Neill’s conscience and imagination in his parody “Denial without End” (Eugene O’Neill Review 30 [2008]: 150–55).
14. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 161.
15. Ibid., 165.
16. Weather described in Alexander Woollcott, “The Play: The New O’Neill Play,” New York Times, March 6, 1922, 9; “ten bottles” from Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 85.
17. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 86; Dorothy Commins, ed., “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill-Commins Correspondence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 22n29.
18. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 22.
19. Ibid., 23.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 24, 25.
22. Ibid., 25.
23. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 87.
24. David Karsner, “Here and There and Everywhere,” New York Call, May 20, 1922, 10.
25. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, November 5, 1961, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
26. Carl Hovey to Eugene O’Neill, August 13, 1918, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
27. Heywood Broun, “It Seems to Me,” New York World, April 25, 19
22. Gold is quoted in this column.
28. L. E. Levick, “The Hairy Ape and the I.W.W.—Marine Transport Workers Turn Dramatic Critics and Praise O’Neill,” Freeman, May 1922.
29. “O’Neill, Hopkins and Hairy Ape Demand Amnesty,” New York Call, July 1, 1922, 1, 5.
30. Kenneth Macgowan, “Curtain Calls,” New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, March 16, 1922.
31. “Court Has Case of Provincetown Players Dropped,” March 1922, Clippings Scrapbook, Eugene O’Neill Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven.
32. “Censorship at Its Worst,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 19, 1922; “Censors to Take Up Hairy Ape,” New York Call, May 20, 1922, 1; Lawrence Reamer, “Mr. O’Neill at Home,” New York Herald, June 4, 1922; “Calls Hairy Ape’s Foes ‘Poor Dolts,’” New York World, [May] 1922.
33. Reamer, “Mr. O’Neill at Home”; Karsner, “Here and There and Everywhere,” May 20, 1922, 10.
34. FBI memorandum, April 22, 1924; David Karsner, “Here and There and Everywhere,” New York Call, June 2, 1922.
35. Patterson James, “Off the Record,” Billboard, June 10, 1922, 18.
36. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 167.
37. Eleanor M. Fitzgerald, “Valedictory of an Art Theatre,” New York Times, December 22, 1929, in Kenton, Provincetown Players, 199.
38. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 21; Kenneth Macgowan, “Seen on the Stage,” Vogue, May 1, 1922, 108. For Hopkins’s role, see Woollcott, “The Play: Eugene O’Neill at Full Tilt,” 18; “The Highbrow: At the Play; The Hairy Ape, at the Provincetown Playhouse,” Town Topics, March 16, 1922, 13.
39. Kenton, Provincetown Players, 156; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 168.
40. George Cram Cook to Edna Kenton, July 8, 1922, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
41. Quoted in Kenton, Provincetown Players, 156.
42. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 172; Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 26; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 66–67.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 60
