Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  156. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” January 27, 22, and 31, 1925.

  157. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 163.

  158. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” January 9, 1925.

  159. King, Another Part of a Long Story, 137.

  160. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” February 8, 1925; Eugene O’Neill, “To Alice,” in Poems, 1912–1944, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 95; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 164.

  161. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” February 21, 24, 25, and 27, 1925.

  162. Percy Hammond, “The Theaters: Mr. O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms Is the Best of His Pleasing Tortures,” New York Herald Tribune, November 12, 1924, 14; Basso, “Tragic Sense—II,” 43; Louis Sheaffer, TS, n.d., in Desire Under the Elms folder, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  163. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” February 10 and 16 and March 9, 1925.

  164. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 54; Eugene O’Neill to J. O. Lief, March 28, 1925, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  165. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 38.

  166. “Laughs Mark Trial of O’Neill Actors,” New York Times, April 13, 1926.

  167. Ibid.

  168. Louis Sheaffer, TS, n.d., in Desire Under the Elms folder, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  169. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 315.

  170. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 187; Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 202; Cowley, “A Weekend with Eugene O’Neill,” 46; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 126.

  171. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 54; O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” March 22 and 25, 1925.

  172. Quoted in Waters, Eugene O’Neill and Family, 27.

  173. 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. Light, “Parade of Masks.” Kenneth Macgowan also provides a reflection on O’Neill’s use of masks in the playbill for The Great God Brown. Kenneth Macgowan, “The Mask in Drama,” Greenwich Playbill, season 1925–26, no. 4: 1, 6, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

  174. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 104.

  175. Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, “O’Neill: The Man with a Mask,” New Republic, March 16, 1927, 94.

  176. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 160.

  177. Quoted in Waters, Eugene O’Neill and Family, 28. Oona was born the week the megastar and (thirty-six-year-old) future husband Charlie Chaplin was wrapping up the final scene of his smash hit The Gold Rush (1925).

  178. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” June 6, 1925. (Note at bottom reads: “Should be Thursday,” which would make it June 4.)

  179. Ibid., June 15, 1925. O’Neill considered titling Strange Interlude “The Haunted”; The Haunted became the title of the third play in his 1931 trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 58).

  180. Agnes Boulton to Harold de Polo, June 18, 1925, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

  181. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” July 17 and 18, 1925.

  182. Ibid., September 11, 1925. The Long Voyage Home and The Emperor Jones opened on September 10, 1925, at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.

  183. Boulton, “Eugene’s Drinking”; O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” August 2 and 6, 1925.

  184. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 183.

  185. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” October 5, 1925.

  186. O’Neill to Art McGinley, April 9, 1927, 1 [page 2 missing], Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. In this letter, O’Neill says this is the last time he drank, but in fact, as is clear from his “Scribbling Diary” of 1925, he continued drinking throughout that fall.

  187. Quoted in Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (New York: Applause, 2000), 209.

  188. Quoted in Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Letters (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 99.

  189. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” November 23, 1925. O’Neill writes, “On bust with Bunnie … stayed up all night with Bunnie and Mary.” Dabney, Edmund Wilson, 99; Wilson, The Twenties, 110–12, 400; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 267.

  190. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” November 24, 1925.

  191. Light, “Parade of Masks.”

  192. Ibid.

  193. James Light, interview by Sheaffer, May 21, 1960.

  194. Mary McCarthy, “Eugene O’Neill—Dry Ice” (1959), in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Iceman Cometh”: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John H. Raleigh (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 50. This essay is an expansion of her original review of Iceman for Partisan Review, November–December 1946, 577–79. The earlier version does not include the elephant metaphor.

  195. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 122; “A Letter from O’Neill,” New York Times, April 11, 1920; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 122. In his 1933 play Days Without End O’Neill would make his long-held frustration, one that went back at least as far as Diff’rent, even more transparent by titling his acts “Plot for a Novel” and “Plot for a Novel Continued.”

  196. James Light’s reminiscence doesn’t specify a date, but he makes it clear the meeting took place between O’Neill’s The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude, the latter of which Light knew O’Neill had begun that spring 1925, but for which he hadn’t yet begun writing the dialogue. In O’Neill’s “Scribbling Diary,” he remarks on November 24 that he was “disgusted” with The Fountain, and then went to Jimmy Light’s that evening.

  197. O’Neill was borrowing his analogy from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay “A Defense of Poetry” (1821): “The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.”

  198. Light, “Parade of Masks.”

  199. Ibid.

  200. Eugene O’Neill to Alexander King, January 29, 1932, in the author’s possession.

  201. Aside from two days reviewing the proofs for the book version of The Great God Brown, there are no creative work days listed in his work diary from November 12, 1925, when he finished act 3, scene 1 of Lazarus Laughed, to March 6, 1926, when his entry reads, “Started actual work on Lazarus Laughed—don’t like as is” (O’Neill, Work Diary, 23).

  202. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” December 9, 10, and 11, 1925.

  203. Gilbert W. Gabriel, “De Leon O’Neill in Search of His Spring,” New York Sun, December 11, 1925, 34; Bogard, Contour in Time, 238.

  204. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” December 27 and 31, 1925, and January 1, 1926.

  205. King, Another Part of a Long Story, 143; Dr. G. V. Hamilton, A Research in Marriage (New York: Lear, 1929), 240.

  206. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 142–43. See also James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, March 26, 1959, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  207. O’Neill, “Scribbling Diary,” October 16, 1925.

  208. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 140.

  209. Quoted in Edward L. Shaughnessy, Eugene O’Neill in Ireland: The Critical Reception (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988), 13.

  210. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 144.

  211. Harry Kemp, “Out of Provincetown: A Memoir of Eugene O’Neill” (1930), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 102.

  212. Quot
ed in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 192.

  213. Eugene O’Neill, “Eugene O’Neill Writes about His Latest Play, The Great God Brown,” New York Evening Post, February 13, 1926.

  214. Ibid.; John Anderson, “The Play: O’Neill’s Newest Play Opens at the Greenwich Village,” New York Evening Post, January 25, 1926, 6; J. Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: Symbolism in an O’Neill Tragedy,” New York Times, January 25, 1926, 26.

  215. William Harrigan [actor who played William Brown], interview by Louis Sheaffer, December 13, 1960, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 549.

  216. Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 106.

  217. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 211.

  218. Waters, Eugene O’Neill and Family, 49, 59.

  219. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 204.

  220. Ibid., 203.

  221. Ibid., 205, 213.

  222. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 29.

  223. For a theoretical analysis of novelistic attributes of O’Neill’s plays, see Kurt Eisen, The Inner Strength of Opposites: O’Neill’s Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).

  224. For more on the role of alcohol in O’Neill’s late plays, see Stephen F. Bloom, “The Role of Drinking and Alcoholism in O’Neill’s Late Plays,” Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 8, no. 1 (1984), http://eoneill.com/library/newsletter/viii_1/viii-1e.htm.

  225. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 205.

  226. Ibid., 232; George Jean Nathan, “The Cosmopolite of the Month,” Cosmopolitan, February 1937, 8, 11.

  227. Quoted in David Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine,” New York Herald Tribune, August 8, 1926, sec. 8, 4.

  228. Quoted in Madeline Smith, “George Pierce Baker,” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:530.

  229. Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine,” 6.

  230. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 208.

  231. Quoted in ibid., 209.

  232. Quoted in ibid., 211. O’Neill, if not the people of New London, might have taken some consolation in the fact that the beach’s Coney Island–style boardwalk and touristy shops would be washed out to sea by the hurricane of 1939.

  233. David E. Philips, “Eugene O’Neill’s Fateful Maine Interlude,” Down East 28, no. 1 (1981): 106, 87.

  234. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 206; quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 211.

  235. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 210.

  236. Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine,” 5.

  237. Sergeant, “O’Neill,” 96, 91.

  238. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 213.

  239. Ibid., 216; King, Another Part of a Long Story, 149.

  240. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 230; King, Another Part of a Long Story, 149.

  241. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 221–22, 223.

  242. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 150.

  243. Philips, “Eugene O’Neill’s Fateful Maine Interlude,” 104; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 217; O’Neill, Work Diary, 29.

  244. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 229.

  245. Quoted in Philips, “Eugene O’Neill’s Fateful Maine Interlude,” 106.

  246. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 217.

  247. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 207; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 211.

  248. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 211, 212.

  249. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 210.

  250. Philips, “Eugene O’Neill’s Fateful Maine Interlude,” 99.

  251. Harold De Polo, “Meet Eugene O’Neill—Fisherman,” Outdoor America, May 1928, 5–8.

  252. Harold de Polo, TS, explanation for inscribed copy of The Great God Brown, January 16, 1960, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

  253. Signed copy of The Great God Brown, from the five-volume set “The Great God Brown,” “The Fountain,” “The Moon of the Caribbees” and Other Plays (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), inscribed to Harold de Polo, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

  254. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 72.

  255. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 210, 201, 209; O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 73. After their breakup in 1926, the Experimental Theatre, Inc., would carry on without O’Neill but under Macgowan and Jones’s leadership for another three and a half seasons.

  256. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 215, 253, 269.

  257. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 233.

  258. O’Neill, Work Diary, July through September, 1926.

  259. Ibid., October through November, 1926.

  260. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 238.

  261. Waters, Eugene O’Neill and Family, 53–54, 59, 60; King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 217.

  262. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 226, 231.

  263. Ibid., 229.

  264. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 128.

  265. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 238.

  266. Richard Watts Jr., “Realism Doomed, O’Neill Believes,” New York Herald Tribune, February 5, 1928, sec. 7, 2; O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 75; Light, “Parade of Masks.”

  267. See Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 181; and Harley Hammerman, introductory note to “Autograph Manuscript, 1 page,” Hammerman Collection, http://eoneill.com/manuscripts/27200.htm.

  268. Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, April 27, 1928 (incomplete), Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.

  269. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 312.

  270. Eugene O’Neill, “Autograph Manuscript, 1 page,” Hammerman Collection, http://eoneill.com/manuscripts/27200.htm.

  271. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 181.

  272. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 239, 240.

  273. Ibid., 164.

  274. Ibid., 150n2.

  275. Ibid., 244.

  276. Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain: The Story of a Life in Two Fields, Theatre and Invention, by the Founder of the Theatre Guild (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 232.

  277. Ibid. This Cine-Kodak film is located at Yale’s Beinecke Library, Eugene O’Neill Collection.

  278. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 253.

  279. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 155.

  280. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 249, 251–52.

  281. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 244.

  282. Ibid., 255, 261, 259.

  283. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 229. This is O’Neill’s paraphrase of her letter to him.

  284. King, “A Wind Is Rising,” 294.

  285. During her absence that December and January, Finn Mac Cool was shot and killed by a neighbor for invading his chicken coop once too often. The dog was “Shane’s best friend,” Shane’s daughter Sheila wrote in 2008. “Seven-year-old Shane was all alone to deal with the death of his dog. I now know why Shane was so depressed all the time” (Sheila O’Neill, afterword to More of a Long Story, http://www.eoneill.com/library/more/afterword.htm).

  286. Quoted in King, Another Part of a Long Story, 266n4.

  287. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 280.

  288. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 34, 51; Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 42.

  289. Kelcey Allen, “Marco Millions Is Poignant O’Neill Satire,” Women’s Wear Daily, January 10, 1928, sec. 1, 4, quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 109; Floyd, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 167; Bruce Gould, “At the Playhouses: O’Neill Takes a Crack at Babbitt,” Wall Street News, January 12, 1928, 4.

  290. Quoted in Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), 83.

  291. J. Brooks Atkinson, “Strange Interlude Plays Five Hours,” New York Times, January 31, 1928, 28.

  292. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 287.

  293. In his 1925 work diary, O’Neill unambiguously wrote, “He is bisexual” (quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 71). Ned Darrell describes him as “one of those poor devils
who spend their lives trying not to discover which sex to belong to!” (CP2, 662). His name is an amalgam of two friends, the artists Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley.

  294. This argument has been convincingly argued in Brenda Murphy, “O’Neill’s America: The Strange Interlude between the Wars,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, ed. Michael Manheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135–47. The term “schoolboy ideals” is Murphy’s.

  295. Eugene O’Neill, “Memoranda on Masks,” in The Unknown O’Neill, 426.

  296. George Jean Nathan, “Eugene O’Neill as a Character in Fiction” (1929), in The Magic Mirror: Selected Writings on the Theatre by George Jean Nathan, ed. Thomas Quinn Curtiss (New York: Knopf, 1960), 107.

  297. Wainscott, Staging O’Neill, 234.

  298. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 247.

  299. Quoted in Bogard, Contour in Time, 307n. (This Bogard Contour reference alone is to the 1972 edition; all other references are to the 1988 revised edition.)

  300. Wainscott, Staging O’Neill, 235.

  301. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 287, 288; Thomas Van Dycke, “9-Act O’Neill Drama Opens,” New York Morning Telegraph, January 31, 1928, 5; Dudley Nichols, “The New Play,” New York World, January 31, 1928, 11.

  302. George Jean Nathan, “Ervine Encore,” American Mercury, February 1929, 246; Arthur H. Nethercot, “The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O’Neill,” Modern Drama 1, no. 3 (1960): 244; Alan Dale, “O’Neill Play of Nine Acts and Six Hours Reviewed by Dale,” New York American, January 31, 1928, 9; Heywood Broun, “It Seems to Me,” New York World, March 4, 1928; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 189.

  303. These scrapbooks are at the Beinecke Library.

  304. Richard Watts Jr., “Realism Doomed, O’Neill Believes,” New York Herald Tribune, February 5, 1928, sec. 7, 2.

  305. George Jean Nathan, “Eugene O’Neill” (1932), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 132.

  306. R. A. Parker, “An American Dramatist Developing” (1921), in J. Y. Miller, ed., Playwright’s Progress: O’Neill and the Critics (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965), 28–29.

  307. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Drama: Strange Interlude,” Nation, February 15, 1928, 192.