43. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 97.
44. Kyra Markham to Louis Sheaffer, September 6, 1962 (photocopy), private collection of Jackson R. Bryer.
45. See Brian Rogers, “Brook Farm,” 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), 2:538.
46. Hamilton Basso, “The Tragic Sense—II,” New Yorker, March 6, 1948, 38; quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 282.
47. Quoted in 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), 145, 126. Only two charred fragments and a transcribed page of the novel, which, like Welded, was a fictional but deeply personal account of their marriage, has survived.
48. Teddy Ballantine’s undated interview with Sheaffer indicates that this took place at Brook Farm, though he presumed it was a portrait of Agnes instead of her father. Boulton told Sheaffer it happened at Brook Farm as well (Son and Artist, 107).
49. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 110–11.
50. See ibid., 125, 259n54.
51. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 107.
52. Lloyd Goodrich, notes supplied to the author by Kathleen A. Foster, the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator and Director of American Art, Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art.
53. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 259n54.
54. Eakins biographer Gordon Hendricks saw another sketch of Teddy Boulton, but that is also lost (Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997], 278n18). The physical work of the portrait published here was sold first to the Hirschl and Adler Galleries in 1987, then again to a private buyer by Sotheby’s in 1997. My thanks to Hirschl and Adler’s Genevieve Hulley, assistant to the senior vice president of American Paintings and Sculpture, and Kathleen A. Foster.
55. Geoff Thompson rightly shifts the psychological import for O’Neill from O’Neill’s writing to his drinking in his clinical psychology master’s thesis at Trinity Western University, “A Touch of the Poet: A Psychobiography of Eugene O’Neill’s Recovery from Alcoholism” (2004).
56. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 107; Barrett H. Clark, Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1947), 42; 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), 73; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 102.
57. Louis Kantor, “O’Neill Defends His Play of the Negro” (1924), in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 49.
58. The following year, Boulton would even use the name “Elinor” as her pseudonym when she copyrighted her own marriage play, The Guilty One, based on a 1917 scenario of O’Neill’s The Reckoning.
59. 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), 56.
60. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85), trans. Thomas Common, Project Gutenberg, Release #1988, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1998.
61. Ibid.
62. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 271; Virginia Floyd, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), 133.
63. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 106, 107.
64. Ibid., 107.
65. Ibid., 116; Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 27.
66. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 105.
67. Ibid., 117.
68. Malcolm Cowley, “A Weekend with Eugene O’Neill,” in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 41.
69. Hart Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, ed. Brom Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).
70. Cowley, “A Weekend with Eugene O’Neill,” 45.
71. Ibid., 47, 49.
72. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 378; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 117.
73. During her tenure as the Players’ official secretary-treasurer, Fitzgerald probably raised more money to keep Macdougal Street operational than the rest of the Players combined. “No one to whom she appealed could doubt her good sense or her competence,” wrote E. E. Cummings, whose play him Fitzgerald would help usher onto the Macdougal Street stage in 1928 (quoted in Black, “Pioneering Theatre Managers,” 52–53).
74. Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931), 97.
75. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 182.
76. George Cram Cook to Edna Kenton, July 10–23, 1922, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
77. Quoted in Paul Roazen, “O’Neill and Louise Bryant: New Documents,” Eugene O’Neill Review 27 (2005): 35.
78. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 186; Eugene O’Neill to Susan Glaspell, June 3, 1924, Susan Glaspell Collection, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
79. Quoted in Black, “Pioneering Theatre Managers,” 49.
80. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 31.
81. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 101; Eugene O’Neill, “Strindberg and Our Theatre” (1924), in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 109; Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 102.
82. Agnes Boulton, “An Experimental Theatre: The Provincetown Playhouse,” Theatre Arts 8 (March 1924): 188; Alexander Woollcott, “The Stage: The New O’Neill Work,” New York World, December 11, 1925, 15.
83. O’Neill, “Strindberg and Our Theatre,” 108; Ronald H. Wainscott, Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 117; James Light, “The Parade of Masks,” undated, T-Mss 2001–050, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.
84. Light, “Parade of Masks.”
85. Ibid.
86. Eugene O’Neill, “Memoranda on Masks,” in The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished and Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 407, 410.
87. Heywood Broun, “The New Play: At the Provincetown Playhouse,” New York World, April 7, 1924, 9; Robert Gilbert Welsh, “Classics and Provincetown,” New York Telegram and Evening Mail, April 7, 1924, 13.
88. E. W. Osborn, “The New Plays: Welded,” New York Evening World, March 18, 1924, 10; Arthur Pollock, “The New Plays: Welded,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 18, 1924, 9.
89. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 132; Gordon Whyte, “The New Plays on Broadway,” Billboard, March 29, 1924, 34; Edna Kenton to Carl Van Vechten, April 4, 1924 (incomplete TS), Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
90. Stark Young, “Eugene O’Neill: Notes from a Critic’s Diary,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1957, 66–71, 74; Macgowan, “Seen on the Stage,” 92; Kantor, “O’Neill Defends,” 49.
91. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 108; Kenneth Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again,” New York Times, August 31, 1924, X2.
92. Publicity Committee, “The Fifteen Year Record of the Class of 1910 of Princeton University,” 1925, TS, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
93. Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 126–27.
94. “James Light Dies; O’Neill Associate,” New York Times, February 12, 1964; Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 112; Karl Decker, “Chillun Roasted by 100,000 Women,” New York Morning Telegraph, March 20, 1924.
95. Virginia Floyd, ed., Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for His Plays (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 53 (emphasis added); “Village Man Who Helped Famous Playwright Dies,” New York Amsterdam News, Novembe
r 27, 1929, 3.
96. Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 176.
97. Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
98. Gene Fowler, “God’s Chillun Is Staged at Provincetown,” New York American, May 16, 1924, 10.
99. Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again.”
100. For the date of completion, see Agnes Boulton to Harold de Polo, October 20, 1923, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
101. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 135.
102. Kantor, “O’Neill Defends,” 46; Carol Bird, “Eugene O’Neill—The Inner Man” (1924), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 54.
103. TS of O’Neill’s statement, March 19, 1924, is in Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
104. Quoted in Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 109.
105. Ibid., 111.
106. Sheaffer notes on All God’s Chillun: refers to an unnamed article in the New York American. Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
107. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 140.
108. Light, interview by Sheaffer, November 5, 1961.
109. George Jean Nathan, “The Theatre,” American Mercury, May 1924, 113; “Shieks [sic], Art and Uplift,” Fiery Cross, February 29, 1924, 4.
110. Glenda Frank, “Tempest in Black and White: The 1924 Premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” Resources for American Literary Study 26, no. 1 (2000): 79.
111. T. S. Eliot, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 169; Edmund Wilson, “All God’s Chillun and Others,” New Republic, May 28, 1924, 22.
112. Alain Locke, “The Negro and the American Stage,” in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 118; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 138.
113. Quoted in Jordan Y. Miller, Playwright’s Progress: O’Neill and the Critics (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965), 39.
114. “Negroes Protest New O’Neill Play: Boston Will Ban All God’s Chillun Got Wings as Insulting Colored Race,” Morning Telegraph, February 24, 1924; Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again”; “Negro Clergy Bitter at Play,” New York American, March 15, 1924, 24.
115. 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), 353, 352.
116. The African American actor John Douglas Thompson, who played Jones in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production in the 2009–10 season, remarked that the only way he could justify accepting the role for himself was to fully “oppress” the white character Smithers (“O’Neill in Bohemia,” Eugene O’Neill International Conference, New York City, June 22–26, 2011). A 1992 postmodern revival by the Wooster Group boldly, and highly successfully, cast Kate Valk, a white woman in blackface, as Brutus Jones.
117. T. B. Poston, “Harlem Dislikes ‘Nigger’ in Emperor Jones but Flocks to See Picture at Uptown House,” New York Amsterdam News, September 27, 1933, 9.
118. Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again.”
119. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 140.
120. Quoted in Michael A. Morrison, “Emperors Before Gilpin: Opal Cooper and Paul Robeson,” Eugene O’Neill Review 33, no. 2 (2012): 167.
121. Light, interview by Sheaffer, November 5, 1961; for the location of Barney Gallant’s speakeasies, see Emily Kies Folpe, It Happened on Washington Square (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 220, 271.
122. Heywood Broun, “Seeing Things at Night,” New York World, June 22, 1924; Crane, Letters.
123. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 143; Sheila Evans, “Paul Robeson, the Actor,” performed by Sheila Evans and Paul Robeson Jr., Mustard Seed, 2003, CD; “Chillun Barred as Too Youthful, Mayor Explains,” New York Evening World, May 16, 1924, 9.
124. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 111; Percy Hammond, “The Theaters,” New York Herald Tribune, May 16, 1924, 10; Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again.”
125. “Hylan Stands Pat against Chillun: Provincetown Attorney’s Plea for Reconsideration of Action Barring Children Fails,” New York Morning Telegraph, May 17, 1924, 1; “Wings Are Folded by God’s Chillun,” New York Morning Telegraph, May 19, 1924, 1.
126. Publicity Committee, “The Fifteen Year Record of the Class of 1910”; Burns Mantle, “All God’s Chillun with One Scene Cut,” New York Daily News, May 16, 1924, 24.
127. Kelcey Allen, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings Proves a Poignant Drama,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 16, 1924, 30. In contrast, the current drama critic for the New Yorker, Hilton Als, who is African American, considers All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Thirst “just plain wrong but historically fascinating” plays in which O’Neill “had tackled—and made a hash of—race” (Hilton Als, “The Theatre: The Red and the Black,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013, 82). It’s interesting to note that Als did not cite The Dreamy Kid or The Emperor Jones. Langston Hughes, whose poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was printed in the program for The Emperor Jones revival then playing on alternate nights, could not have been the poet Kelcey Allen refers to, since he was in Paris at the time of the production.
128. Karl Decker, “All God’s Chillun Crippled at the Birth,” New York Morning Telegraph, May 17, 1922, 2. The lady critic may well have been Ann Bridgers of Raleigh, North Carolina’s News and Observer, who considered the play a work of “flabby sentimentalism” that succeeded only in painting “black blacker” (Ann Bridgers, “Impressions along Broadway,” Raleigh News and Observer, July 6, 1924, sec. 10, 8).
129. Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again”; “Chillun Barred as Too Youthful, Mayor Explains,” 9; Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again.”
130. Arthur Pollock, “The New Plays: All God’s Chillun,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 16, 1924, 5; “Prologue of All God’s Chillun Is Read, as Child Actors Are Barred,” New York World, May 16, 1924, 13; Robert C. Benchley, “Drama,” Life, June 5, 1924, 22.
131. Robeson would also play Yank in a 1931 London revival of The Hairy Ape.
132. Robeson, “Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays,” 353.
133. Quoted in Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, 110.
134. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 190, 189.
135. Ibid., 189, 190.
136. Ibid, 191, 188.
137. From the reviews we can glean in what order the plays were produced, a common point of confusion: The Moon of the Caribbees, The Long Voyage Home, In the Zone, and Bound East for Cardiff. On December 16, the Glencairn production moved uptown to the Punch and Judy Theatre and then, on January 12, to the Princess Theatre. In 1940, John Ford directed a film of the series titled The Long Voyage Home, with a screenplay by O’Neill’s friend Dudley Nichols and with John Wayne playing the Swedish sailor Olson. It was O’Neill’s favorite of the numerous film versions of his plays made while he was still alive.
138. George Jean Nathan, “The Kahn-Game,” Judge, December 6, 1924, 17.
139. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 188.
140. After its run, O’Neill still accused Jones, for all his pioneering methods, of failing to produce the play “as I wrote it” (ibid., 213).
141. Quoted in Eugene O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 70.
142. Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, “The Drama: Eugene O’Neill on Plymouth Rock,” Catholic World, January 1925, 520.
143. Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924–1933 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 36; Arthur Gelb, “Film Version of Play Recalls Complexity of Its Origins,” New York Times, March 2, 1958; Eugene O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan, ed. Nancy L. Roberts and Arthur W. Roberts (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 54.
144. 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; Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 34.
145. Gilbert W. Gabriel, “Desire Under the Elms: Eugene O’Neill’s New Tragedy of an Old Soil Staged at the Greenwich Village,” New York Telegram and Evening Mail, November 12, 1924, 26; Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 38.
146. Agnes Boulton to Harold de Polo, October 6, 1924, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature; Agnes Boulton, “Eugene’s Drinking,” n.d., TS (carbon copy), Beinecke Library. “Eugene’s Drinking” is written in pencil on the stationary of Dr. Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton’s Bureau of Social Hygiene and Division of Psychological Research. This would date it January 1926.
147. Boulton, “Eugene’s Drinking.”
148. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 33.
149. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 136.
150. Juliet Throckmorton, “As I Remember Eugene O’Neill,” Yankee Magazine, August 1968, 85, 93–95.
151. Eugene O’Neill to Harold de Polo, February 6, [probably 1925], Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
152. For a more complete picture of the O’Neills’ life in Bermuda, see Joy Bluck Waters, Eugene O’Neill and Family: The Bermuda Interlude (Warwick, Bermuda: Granaway), 1992.
153. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” January 1 and 4, 1925, Eugene O’Neill Papers.
154. Eugene O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill Work Diary, 1924–1943 (preliminary edition), vol. 1, transcribed by Donald Gallup (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1981), January 5, 1925.
155. Boulton indicates in “Eugene’s Drinking” that he stopped on January 6, but his work diary clearly shows that he’d only begun “tapering off.” O’Neill maintained what he called “scribbling diaries” starting in 1924. In 1931, his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, gave him a five-year diary, which he used to transfer work-related information from the original diaries. He then destroyed the original, more personal volumes. Agnes Boulton saved one of them, for the year 1925, which enraged O’Neill, but it offers treasured biographical information about the playwright’s life during this period, especially his battle with alcoholism.
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