Long Night’s Journey

Much has been written about O’Neill, by himself and sundry others, but more keeps coming to light. Only recently—too late to be included in extant collections of his plays—the sole copy of Exorcism, a play about his failed suicide, has surfaced, and it contributes a significant novelty to Robert M. Dowling’s valuable new biography, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts. The postulated four acts of the life story are seen as emblematic of the four acts in which so many of O’Neill’s plays are written.

Eugene’s early life in his family’s New London, Connecticut, home was relatively uneventful, except for the young fellow’s tuberculosis, for which his stingy father kept sending him to cheap, inadequate institutions. There was the horrible example of Irish-born father James, who could have been a great classical actor had he not chosen more-lucrative matinee idolhood in the melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo, with which he kept touring the country and becoming rich, yet miserly about a son’s survival.

Eugene and his brother Jamie were dragged from pillar to post, with their mother another terrible example, a morphine addict stemming from a hack physician’s prescription to ease her parturitional pain. So Eugene, as Dowling summarizes, became “antisocial, alcoholic, a heavy smoker. His father was a domineering overachiever and his brother an underachiever and a world-class drunk. His mother, Ella, had been a morphine addict since the day he was born.”

He lasted one year at Princeton and, later, at Harvard, in George Pierce Baker’s famous playwriting seminar, despite Baker’s considering him his best student. On he went into the merchant marine, sailoring through Latin America and hitting ground in Greenwich Village at Jimmy the Priest’s saloon, and another nearby bar known as the Hell Hole, drinking with a series of deadbeats downstairs while sharing a filthy upstairs room with a couple of them.

A chief buddy was the 61-year-old boozer Terry Carlin, from whom Eugene got the idea of “philosophical anarchism.” The two moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1916, where a theatrical group, eventually known as the Provincetown Players, had formed. It comprised a number of gifted people, chief among them the playwright Susan Glaspell, the set designer/director Robert Edmond Jones, and the political-journalist couple John Reed and Louise Bryant, the latter of whom had a brief, turbulent affair with Eugene.

It was by the Provincetown Players, who later moved to Greenwich Village, that Eugene had eight plays produced in two years. As reflected in his writing, his taste gradually improved: The early enthusiast for Swinburne and Rossetti, who memorized and would recite “The Hound of Heaven,” moved on to Strindberg and Nietzsche—albeit also to the anarchist Max Stirner. (He came to respect Freud, but, contrary to general perception, disclaimed him as an influence.) 

There were women with whom he was involved—one of whom, Kathleen Jenkins, he impregnated. He lovelessly married her and showed little interest in their child, Eugene O’Neill Jr., yet he was interested in the Players, to whom he first read an unsuccessful play, and later his first success, Bound East for Cardiff (1914), one of several seafaring dramas that started his career.

Though excessively sensitive and said to “grieve like a stricken collie if you so much as looked an unkind thought at him,” O’Neill persevered. It led to four Pulitzer Prizes and, in 1936, to the Nobel Prize for Literature, which no other American dramatist had ever won.

Dowling does a nice job summing up what the O’Neill plays are about, how many of them shocked their contemporaries—making blacks their principals, having a socialite fall for a brutish stoker—and how the critics managed, with a few exceptions, to underestimate and even savage them. The plays got more and more adventurous, if not always better—Dowling is never blind to Eugene’s failings—as O’Neill’s private life, too, became more complicated.

It is fascinating how divergent the various views of O’Neill could be. Thus, the famous Catholic convert and social worker Dorothy Day—for a while his (allegedly platonic) girlfriend—while fascinated by his intellect, never found him “really physically exciting.” But one night, in the backroom of the Hell Hole, there entered a 25-year-old beauty, Agnes Boulton, who uncannily resembled Louise Bryant. Soon O’Neill left Day for her, declaring (perhaps jokingly) that his ideal would be a composite of wife, mistress, mother, and valet. Agnes Boulton was never organized enough to be a valet, but they eventually got married.  

It was not a felicitous union. “Gene knew how to hurt me,” Agnes noted. 

As for O’Neill, who, in the early stages of their relationship, would hide in a closet when Agnes’s kin visited, he answered his critics this way: “I’ll write about happiness if I ever happen to meet up with that luxury, and find it sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life.” A problem with the marriage was the rivalry that resulted from Agnes being a successful novelist. But then, O’Neill would not even attend his brother’s funeral, pleading hangover. With The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922), he found a satisfactory blend of naturalism and expressionism that became his first major style, which he called super-naturalism. “Truth in the theater as in life,” he averred, “is eternally difficult, just as the easy is the everlasting lie.” He even tried his hand at fiction, envying the novelist’s opportunities: “Crowding drama into a play is like getting an elephant to dance in a tub,” he complained.

Still, Desire Under the Elms (1924) became the longest-running tragedy in American theater history, with 420 performances. But the problem remained:  “To express a character’s submerged foundation, the dramatist only has the soliloquy. But the soliloquy is in the dramatic warehouse relegated there by modern realism.” Dowling is good both at summarizing O’Neill’s plays, including the manifest failures that got neither revived nor read, and at tracing the playwright’s gallant efforts to extend his dramas’ reach inward as well as outward. This is where such things as masks and simultaneous voicing of a character’s speech and thought come in, laudable experimentation even if the result—with the grandiose middle-period plays, hailed at the time—has proved less than successful.

With his marriage to Agnes Boulton, O’Neill began a neurotic search for the right habitat that was to plague him both in that marriage and even more so in his next, to the beautiful actress Carlotta Monterey—a risky business, as she had been through three marriages and a long affair with a Wall Street banker. George Jean Nathan, a friend, noted that O’Neill considered “ideal” or “best ever” numerous domiciles in America and France, ranging from a Sea Island, Georgia, villa built to his specifications to an actual French château. His and Carlotta’s final home in California, Tao House, proved a lasting repository for his 8,000 books and her 300 pairs of shoes.

But if the marriage to Agnes had steep ups and crashing downs, they were not quite as Strindbergian as the ups and downs with Carlotta, however good she was at managing his business affairs: “I am wife, mistress, housekeeper, secretary, friend and nurse .  .  . everything but his tailor,” she declared. Even their reconciliations were violent, “a combination of name-calling, insults, jumping up and down, screeching, hair-pulling, stamping feet, wrestling and finally winding up in a passionate embrace smothering each other with kisses and hugs.” When O’Neill fell for the beautiful young Jane Caldwell, Carlotta’s jealousy played out with threatened suicide, then murder. Finally, “O’Neill leveled a loaded handgun at her head. She grabbed a butcher knife. He dropped the gun, grabbed her neck, and closed his fingers around it while she dug her fingernails into his hands; eventually, he let go and knocked her out with a crack to the jaw.” 

What sort of a man was he? A writer friend, Benjamin De Casseres, wrote that he “almost awed me .  .  . a grim, unsmiling face taut with suffering, he seemed to say to me: ‘Excuse me for not being nice, but I’ve just returned from hell.’ ” But as one actress wrote, he “was a very beautiful man .  .  . terribly handsome and very gentle.” Another remembered “sweetness—the greatest sweetness I’ve ever found in a human being; that’s Mr. O’Neill’s outstanding quality.” 

So which one was he? Most likely both. What is certain is that he was a failed parent: Both his ne’er-do-well son Shane (by Agnes), and his somewhat more successful son Eugene Jr. (by Kathleen), a Yale professor of classics, committed suicide. He had a long and terrible quarrel with his daughter Oona for marrying Charlie Chaplin, who was 36 years her senior, but they were eventually reconciled, and, considering her the only sensible one among his offspring, having married for wealth, he willed her one of his residences. 

O’Neill’s last, never-fully-diagnosed illness was horrible, and here Carlotta comported herself nobly, looking after her husband better than any trained nurse—including, among other chores, a daily measuring of his urine, preparing him special meals, and waking up in the middle of the night with him. This, despite her having to say to him, two years before his death, “How could you have done that to me?”—and his replying, “Well, it was a helluva fourth act.” Carlotta did well by him posthumously, too, allowing his supreme masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) to be published, which he had permitted in his will, and getting it produced, which he had forbidden forever. 

Altogether, Eugene O’Neill deals cogently with the important final works, identifying, for instance, some of the real people who became characters in The Iceman Cometh (1946). There is, however, a bit of sloppiness: Coming from a professor of English, one shouldn’t see such things as “wracked” for “racked,” a repeated “whom” for “who,” “a sojourn to the city,” “a consternating letter,” “doyen” for a female doyenne, “vouchsafed” for “conceded,” and “fortuitously” for “fortunately.” And there are other kinds of errors: Lee “Strasburg” for Strasberg, Agnes being “tall” in one place and 5’4″ in another, and once calling the favorite dive Jimmy the Priest’s “Johnny the Priest’s.” Still, this joins the two Louis Sheaffer biographies of Eugene O’Neill as a third indispensable account.

John Simon is an author and critic in New York.