148. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 404.
149. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 75.
150. Carlotta Monterey Diary, December 27, 1933, O’Neill Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven.
151. Eugene O’Neill to Robert Sisk, December 27, 1932, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
152. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 104, 149.
153. Cerf, At Random, 81.
154. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 303, 417; see Dorothy Commins, What Is an Editor: Saxe Commins at Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
155. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 410, 506.
156. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 164.
157. O’Neill addresses his letters “Faust, New York,” but that’s the name of a smaller post office within the town of Tupper Lake, not a town itself. The post office was named Faust to distinguish it from the main Tupper Lake post office. The owner of Big Wolf Camp was F. L. Wurzburg, House & Garden’s business manager.
158. Whitney Bolton, “George M. Cohan is the thing in O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!” New York Morning Telegraph, October 4, 1933, 3; Elizabeth Jordan, “Mr. O’Neill Soft-Pedaled,” America, October 28, 1933, 90.
159. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 153; Richard Watts Jr., “O’Neill Is Eager to See Cohan in Ah, Wilderness!” (1933), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 134; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 422.
160. John Mason Brown, “The Play: Mr. Cohan Gives a Magnificent Performance in Mr. O’Neill’s Mellow Comedy, Ah, Wilderness! at the Guild,” New York Evening Post, October 3, 1933, 26.
161. Since its 1933 premiere, Ah, Wilderness! has seen two film adaptations, one a musical entitled Summer Holiday (1948), and was later adapted into a Broadway musical, Take Me Along (1959), and a television miniseries.
162. Quoted in The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished and Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 381.
163. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 256.
164. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 133.
165. Ibid.
166. “Memoranda on Masks” (November 1932), “Second Thoughts” (December 1932), and “A Dramatist’s Notebook” (January 1933).
167. Eugene O’Neill, “Memoranda on Masks,” in Bogard, Unknown O’Neill, 407.
168. Ibid., 408. O’Neill confirms this in a letter to George Jean Nathan (O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 148).
169. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 403.
170. Quoted in Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 202.
171. Travis Bogard contends that “the real drama was O’Neill’s attempt to write the play” (Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, rev. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 328), a drama Stephen A. Black thoroughly sets down in his psychoanalytic biography (Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], 377–87).
172. Quoted in John Mason Brown, “Two on the Aisle: Mr. O’Neill and His Champions—Days Without End Finds Some Tolerant but Sturdy Defenders,” New York Evening Post, January 22, 1934.
173. John Mason Brown, “The Play: The Theatre Guild Presents Earle Larimore and Stanley Ridges in Mr. O’Neill’s Days Without End,” New York Evening Post, January 9, 1934, 17; Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 207; Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: Days Without End,” New York Times, January 9, 1934, 19; Bernard Sobel, “Eugene O’Neill’s New Play Opens at Henry Miller,” New York Daily Mirror, January 10, 1934, 24.
174. Monterey Diary, September 18, 1933.
175. Oscar Cargill, introduction to 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), 10.
176. “O’Neill Produces the Great Catholic Play of the Age,” Queen’s Work, January 1934; Brown, “Two on the Aisle: Mr. O’Neill and His Champions”; Gerard B. Donnelly, “O’Neill’s New Catholic Play,” America, January 13, 1934, 346–47.
177. Quoted in Edward L. Shaughnessy, Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O’Neill’s Catholic Sensibility (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 133.
178. Monterey Diary, April 30, 1933, June 28, 1933.
179. Benjamin De Casseres, “‘Denial Without End’: Benjamin De Casseres’s Parody of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘God Play’ Days Without End,” ed. Robert M. Dowling, Eugene O’Neill Review 30 (2008): 145–59.
180. Croswell Bowen, “The Black Irishman” (1946), in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 80.
181. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 425, 426.
182. Ibid., 433.
183. Brooks Atkinson, “On Days Without End,” New York Times. January 14, 1934; 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.
184. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 424.
185. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 162–63. This letter is edited with brackets to show cross-outs by O’Neill, courtesy of Virginia Floyd, but I have deleted some confusing formatting here.
186. Quoted in Cargill, introduction to O’Neill and His Plays, 10. See Shaughnessy, Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O’Neill’s Catholic Sensibility (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), for a probing and comprehensive analysis, including a complete chapter on Days Without End, of O’Neill’s relationship to Catholicism.
187. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 208; Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 393.
188. “Eugene O’Neill Ill, Unable to Testify,” New York Times, April 13, 1934; “O’Neill Loses Auto Suit,” New York Times, April 17, 1934.
189. Eugene O’Neill to Sherwood Anderson, April 23, 1934, Contempo Records, 1930–1934, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.
190. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 209, 211.
191. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 435–37.
192. Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (1962; rev. ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 439–40.
193. This Marx Brothers line is a double allusion; the “thought aside” method is O’Neill’s from Strange Interlude, but the line itself is a play on John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera: “How happy could I be with either, Were t’ other dear charmer away!”
194. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 443. Jack Benny’s program was broadcast in May 1937.
195. Ibid., 431.
196. Ibid., 446.
197. “Anna Christie,” videocassette, produced and directed by Clarence Brown (coproduced by Paul Bern and Irving Thalberg) (MGM, 1930). “Anna Christie” was eventually made into the Broadway musical New Girl in Town in 1957.
198. Virginia Floyd, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), 201n; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 364; Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 127; O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 207.
199. Zoe Jones, M.D. (current owner of Casa Genotta), interview by the author, May 24, 2013. See also Nathan, “The Bright Face of Tragedy,” 66–69.
200. Basso, “The Tragic Sense—III,” 42.
201. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 144; O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 127; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 400.
202. Monterey Diary, December 24, 1935.
203. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 448. Sheaffer does not refer to O’Neill’s lapse.
204. Monterey Diary, February 21 and 22, 1936.
205. Albert Rothenberg, M.D., “Correspondence,” New England School of Medicine 343, no. 10 (2000): 741.
206. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 218.
207. P. K. Brask, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed,” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:748. For the definitive explication o
f the Cycle, see Donald C. Gallup, Eugene O’Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
208. Quoted in Floyd, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 537.
209. Quoted in Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 182.
210. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 452.
211. Ibid., 451.
212. Ibid., 452.
213. Ibid., 416.
214. Monterey Diary, August 26 and 27, 1936.
215. Ibid., November 12, 1936.
216. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 439; O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 179, 180.
217. “Eugene O’Neill Receives Nobel Prize for Literature,” New York Evening Post, November 12, 1936, 1; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 454; “Nobel Prize Awarded to O’Neill,” New York Times, November 13, 1936.
218. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 458.
219. Ibid., 455.
220. Eugene O’Neill, “The Nobel Prize Acceptance Letter,” in Bogard, Unknown O’Neill, 427–28.
221. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 456.
222. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 164.
223. Brenda Murphy, “Nobel Prize in Literature,” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:680.
224. “Nobel Prize Awarded to O’Neill.” O’Neill disputed that he received twice what other laureates had because of the doubling of prizes (O’Neill, Selected Letters, 554).
225. Per Hallström, “Award Ceremony Speech,” December 10, 1936, Nobel Prize Award Ceremony, Nobel Prizes and Laureates, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1936/press.html; Helburn, Wayward Quest, 279.
226. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 164.
227. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 228; Helburn, Wayward Quest, 268; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 465.
228. Kathryne Albertoni, interview by the author, October 6, 2010.
229. Kathryne Albertoni, Remembering Eugene O’Neill: A Memoir by Kathryne Albertoni, RN (privately printed, 2006), 6, in the author’s possession. Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon inspired scenes and characters in several of Jack London’s works, including The Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild and, most evidently, his memoir of the drinking life, John Barleycorn.
230. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 234.
231. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 187.
232. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 467.
233. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 181.
234. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 471, 472.
235. Helburn, Wayward Quest, 277.
236. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 469.
237. Jane Scovell, Oona: Living in the Shadows (New York: Warner, 1998), 77.
238. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 465.
239. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 190.
240. O’Neill expanded the Cycle backward and forward in time, eventually arriving at eleven planned plays that could be played in repertory and separately (after their initial runs). Their final titles, which he’d shuffled around over time, in order are: Give Me Liberty and—, The Rebellion of the Humble, Greed of the Meek, And Give Me Death, A Touch of the Poet, More Stately Mansions, The Calms of Capricorn, The Earth Is the Limit, Nothing Is Lost but Honor, The Man on Iron Horseback, and The Hair of the Dog.
241. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 483.
242. Albertoni, interview.
243. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 493.
244. Albertoni, interview.
245. Albertoni, Remembering Eugene O’Neill, 11.
246. Scovell, Oona, 79.
247. Ibid.
248. Quoted in Croswell Bowen, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O’Neill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 267.
249. Cerf, At Random, 86; James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, ca. 1959, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 419–20; Cerf, At Random, 87; O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 250.
250. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 480.
251. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 486. He was commenting on Sean O’Casey’s antifascist play The Star Turns Red (1940).
252. Ibid., 507, 486.
253. Ibid., 534.
254. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, xix–xx.
255. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 509, 515.
256. Ibid., 508, 510.
257. Quoted in Helburn, Wayward Quest, 275.
258. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 256, 257.
259. My thanks to poet (and friend) Dan Donaghy, whose reading at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 27, 2010, inspired this connection of The Iceman Cometh, and O’Neill’s state of mind while writing it, to the ancient myth of Pandora’s box.
260. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 501.
261. Normand Berlin, “Endings,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 99.
262. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 502.
263. Quoted in John H. Raleigh, introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Iceman Cometh”: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John H. Raleigh (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 11.
264. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 501, 511.
265. Ibid., 537.
266. Ibid., 508–10.
267. Quoted in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill at Work, 260.
268. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 475, 476.
269. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 150, 189.
270. Travis Bogard, foreword to “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill,” by Eugene O’Neill (1940), in Bogard, Unknown O’Neill, 432.
271. O’Neill, “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene,” 433.
272. Bogard, foreword to “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene.”
273. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 192.
274. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 507, 519.
275. Quoted in Normand Berlin, Eugene O’Neill (New York: Grove, 1982), 88.
276. Quoted in Floyd, Plays of Eugene O’Neill, 549n.
277. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 506–7.
278. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 517.
279. Quoted in Virginia Floyd, ed., Eugene O’Neill: A World View (New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1979), 296.
280. Ingrid Bergman, “A Meeting with Eugene O’Neill,” in Floyd, Eugene O’Neill: A World View, 294.
281. Ibid., 295.
282. Clive Barnes, “Theater: O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions Opens,” New York Times, November 1, 1967, 40.
283. Bergman, “A Meeting with Eugene O’Neill,” 295. Yale University Press published Gierow’s shortened version of the play in English in 1964. Oxford University Press published the first complete unexpurgated edition in September 1988, edited and with an introduction by Martha Gilman Bower.
284. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 528–29.
285. “The Visit of Malatesta” and “The Last Conquest.”
286. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 204; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 538, 531.
287. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 531–32.
288. Ibid., 531.
289. Quoted in Judith Barlow, Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 114.
290. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 532.
291. Quoted in Barlow, Final Acts, 116.
292. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 220.
293. Melville Bernstein to Louis Sheaffer, January 7, 1982, in Dallas Cline (a.k.a. D. C. Thomas), Formidable Shadow. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 538.
294. Eugene O’Neill Jr., “The Last Name Is Not Junior,” TS carbon, corrected, 1948, pp. 2, 7, Eugene O’Neill, Jr. Collection, Beinecke Library.
295. Quoted in Scovell, Oona,
87; David Shields and Shane Salerno, eds. Salinger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 74; quoted in Scovell, Oona, 87.
296. Earl Wilson, “Gene O’Neill Should See Daughter Now,” New York Post, April 13, 1942.
297. Eugene O’Neill to Oona O’Neill, November 19, 1942, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
298. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 529.
299. Scovell, Oona, 100.
300. Eugene O’Neill to Oona O’Neill, November 19, 1942.
301. Ibid.
302. Scovell, Oona, 102.
303. Quoted in ibid., 105, 106.
304. Oona’s children with Chaplin were named Geraldine, Michael, Josephine, Victoria, Eugene, Jane, Annette, and Christopher.
305. Albertoni, interview; Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 212.
306. Basso, “Tragic Sense—III,” 42.
307. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 264.
308. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 566.
309. Quoted in O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 219.
310. Quoted in Helburn, Wayward Quest, 276.
311. O’Neill, “The Theatre We Worked For,” 217.
312. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 552, 550.
313. Monterey Diary, August 6, 1944.
314. O’Neill, “As Ever, Gene,” 230.
315. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 566.
316. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 555.
317. Eugene O’Neill, “To a Stolen Moment” (June 29, 1945), in Bogard, Unknown O’Neill, 376–77.
318. Albertoni, interview.
319. Sheaffer, Son and Artist, 558.
320. Herbert J. Stoeckel, “Memories of Eugene O’Neill,” Hartford Courant, December 6, 1953, 3, 16.
321. Commins, “Love and Admiration and Respect,” 219.
322. Eugene O’Neill, “Last Will and Testament of Eugene O’Neill,” December 5, 1945, Eugene O’Neill Papers, Beinecke Library.
323. James Agee, “The Ordeal of Eugene O’Neill” (1946), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 186; Bowen, “Black Irishman,” 82.
324. John S. Wilson, “O’Neill on the World and The Iceman” (1946), in Estrin, Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 164.
325. Ibid.
326. Ibid., 164–65.
327. Ibid., 166.
328. Agee, “The Ordeal of Eugene O’Neill,” 185.
329. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 199.
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