In December 1905 Clyde William Fitch, then America’s most famous living dramatist, knocked on the door of 884 Park Avenue, the novelist Edith Wharton’s New York residence. Wharton’s first best seller The House of Mirth had just appeared, and Fitch, a flamboyant and prolific playwright rumored to have enjoyed “relations” with Oscar Wilde, asked if he might persuade her to collaborate on a stage adaptation of her new novel. She accepted the offer, though with reservations.

Wharton had tried to win over theatergoers with original plays before. But she could never descend low enough for the average audience and had rebuffed a friend’s advice that if she wanted a hit play, she should consider the century-old costumes and “society gags” that sold at the box office. Many illustrious fiction writers such as herself had taken their turn “on the boards” from the 1880s to the early 1900s—Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Mary Austin, and Jack London, among others—none of them successfully. “Forget not,” Henry James cautioned would-be playwrights, “that you write for the stupid.”

Leaving the Savoy Theatre in Herald Square after the New York premiere of The House of Mirth on October 22, 1906, Wharton remarked to her escort, William Dean Howells, “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.” And after the play received several poor reviews, she admitted, “I now doubt if that kind of play, with a ‘sad ending,’ and a negative hero, could ever get a hearing from an American audience.” Nearly three decades later, Wharton agreed to another collaboration, this time with playwright Zoë Akins, based on Wharton’s dolorous novella The Old Maid (1924). The play was a resounding success, and it beat out Lillian Hellman’s thematically parallel The Children’s Hour and Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! for the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. By then, even Wharton’s play was hotly contested as not original or experimental enough for the award, however, and opponents to the decision consequently founded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

The following year, 1936, Eugene O’Neill, having already won three Pulitzers in the 1920s, emerged as the only American dramatist to date to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was an honor, he told the Swedish Academy, that spoke to the evolution of American drama as a whole: “This highest of distinctions is all the more grateful to me because I feel so deeply that it is not only my work that is being honored, but the work of all of my colleagues in America—that this Nobel Prize is a symbol of the recognition by Europe of the coming-of-age of the American theatre … worthy at last to claim kinship with the modern drama of Europe, from which our original inspiration so surely derives.”

Whatever one’s prejudice about the Nobel or the Pulitzer, and whatever one’s opinion of O’Neill’s tragic vision, by the 1930s, everyone agreed: American plays like O’Neill’s, with “sad endings and negative heroes,” even while faced with daunting competition from the lighter forms of entertainment amply provided by the Hollywood studio system and the commercial theater, had at last found their hearing.

ACT I: The Ghosts at the Stage Door

It is impossible to act in the American play unless we go back and see that the American play really starts with O’Neill. But in order to get to O’Neill, you have to know what was before him. … Before O’Neill in this country, the play was for business, for success, for the star who brought in money, for its fashionableness to an audience. The theater was nothing more, and not thought of as anything more, than a place of amusement.

—STELLA ADLER, 2010

Before Eugene O’Neill … there was a wasteland. … Two centuries of junk.

—GORE VIDAL, 1959

The Treasures of Monte Cristo

MARY ELLEN “ELLA” QUINLAN O’NEILL gave birth to her third and last child, Eugene, at the Barrett House hotel in Manhattan on October 16, 1888. Situated on the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-Third Street, the Barrett House loomed at the intersection of what would become Times Square, the theatrical center of the world. Ella’s hotel room had a corner view of the neighborhood where her newborn’s name would burn brightly on electric marquees as a heady draw for the theatergoing public. Two days after his birth, Eugene was swept away with his family on the first of many national tours with his father, the matinee idol James O’Neill.

One of the most celebrated actors of his day and a natural successor to the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, James was born in 1845, the son of Edward and Mary O’Neill, Irish immigrants of the peasant class from County Kilkenny. In 1850, Edward had emigrated to Buffalo, New York, with his wife and their eight children to escape the devastation of the potato famine. (James was the seventh child, and his sister Margaret, born in Buffalo in 1851, made nine.) The transatlantic journey was so harrowing that James rarely spoke of it as an adult. A few years later, in the mid-1850s, Edward O’Neill returned to Ireland after his eldest son, Richard, died, leaving the rest of the family to fend for themselves. Edward himself died of arsenic poisoning in Ireland six years after his departure, most likely a suicide.1

The Barrett House, O’Neill’s birthplace, at Broadway and Forty-Third Street, later Times Square. O’Neill responded to the friend who sent this image to him as a present that the man leaning against the lamppost obviously “had a bun on” (that is, he was drunk).

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

James O’Neill, at a mere ten years old, was thus compelled to help support his family by working grueling twelve-hour shifts making files at a machine shop. “A dirty barn of a place,” James Tyrone (O’Neill) remembers the shop in his son’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, “where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows, so on grey days I’d have to sit bent over with my eyes almost touching the files in order to see! … And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! It’s the truth! Fifty cents a week!” (CP3, 807). By 1858, the O’Neills had relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where they were largely supported by James’s older sister Josephine, who’d fortuitously married a prosperous Ohio saloonkeeper. It was in Cincinnati that James discovered his talent for acting at age twenty, when he made his debut in 1865 during the final days of the Civil War at Cincinnati’s National Theatre and rapidly gained a reputation as a dashing leading man.

James O’Neill, 1869.

(COURTESY OF THE HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY THEATRE COLLECTION, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.)

The reigning “queen of actresses,” Adelaide Neilson, a British performer whose Juliet was thought to be the finest of all time, was once asked which Romeo among the many she’d played opposite was best. Neilson replied brusquely, “A little Irishman named O’Neill.”2 In 1872, James found himself onstage with Edwin Booth, “the greatest actor of his day or any other,” James Tyrone boasts in Long Day’s Journey (CP3, 809). Booth, the brother of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and James played Othello at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago, each night alternating the roles of Iago and Othello. During one performance, while waiting for his cue in the wings, Booth remarked, “That young man is playing [Othello] better than I ever did.”³ This single evening, after James had been informed of Booth’s tribute to him, marked the high point of his acting career, perhaps of his entire life. James would never again experience such a genuine surge of professional gratification.

On February 12, 1883, James accepted a role at New York’s Booth Theatre that would thrust him into the national limelight, though he would notoriously become trapped by its very popularity: Edmund Dantès in Charles Fechter’s 1870 stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the title of which, though it’s offen forgotten, Fechter had reduced to the more straightforward Monte Cristo.

James had played Edmund Dantès back in Chicago on April 21, 1875, while a stock actor at Hooley’s Theatre, and the reviews for that performance had been excellent. The Spirit of the Times newspaper, however, predicted of the new Booth Theatre production that “Monte Cristo will not run very long.” James had been prevented by heavy snowfall from attending most of the rehearsals, and consequently he’d only had a few days to learn his part. John Stetson, the owner of the Globe Theatre in Boston, ignored the bad notices and kept the production going. Fechter’s widow was brought in as a consultant, and she worked enough magic to make it a hit.⁴

The legendary character Edmund Dantès is an upright sailor wrongly accused of treason against the king of France and cast into a dungeon at the Château d’If off the coast of Marseilles. His imprisonment clears the way for the villain Fernand to gain Edmund’s betrothed, the Catalan Mercédès (a name that James, who spoke some French, liked to enunciate affectedly with a rolling “r”).⁵ After languishing in prison for eighteen years, Edmund makes his getaway with the help of his dying cellmate, friend, and benefactor Abbé Faria. Eventually, he reclaims Mercédès and a son, Albert, who had been conceived before Dantès’s imprisonment (without, as the saying goes, the benefit of clergy). Dantès doesn’t have many lines; most of the dialogue is reserved for the play’s villains pacing about conspiring against one another. But the spectacular prison escape is far and away the most defining scene of James’s career: “The moon breaks out, lighting up a projecting rock,” the stage directions specify, then “Edmund rises from the sea, he is dripping, a knife in his hand, some shreds of sack adhering to it.” He stands up on the stone pedestal and shouts exultantly to the heavens, “The world is mine!” James would enact this climactic scene to as many as six thousand audiences, thus branding his acting reputation forever.6

Monte Cristo playbill.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

Far more relevant to James’s actual life, however, are the lines that precede the heroic declaration: “Saved! Mine, the treasures of Monte Cristo! The world is mine!”⁷ “The treasures of Monte Cristo” refer to a hidden fortune on a deserted island that Faria bequeaths to Dantès before dying in prison. After his daring escape, Dantès spends years traveling the world spending Faria’s money lavishly before, apparently as an afterthought, returning to Mercédès. More than about love, then, Monte Cristo is about money, and James soon decided to acquire his own “treasure of Monte Cristo”: the rights to the Fechter script for $2,000. With sole proprietorship of the play as of the 1885–86 season, James O’Neill would perform the role to packed houses for almost thirty years, earning him a profit of nearly forty thousand a year. Like Edmund Dantès, James had escaped from a prison of his own—the prison of poverty. And both men were spared horrible fates by dint of their talent, honesty, and charisma.8

Charles Fechter’s Monte Cristo is saturated with doses of moustache twirling by evildoers and moral posturing by good-guy swashbucklers. One line from Edmund Dantès neatly sums up the play’s complexity: “Sooner or later believe me, the honest man will meet his reward and the wicked be punished.”⁹ Those who surrender an afternoon to Fechter’s abysmal dialogue will discover their minds drifting off and returning back to a single question: Why would theatergoers choose to see this grossly melodramatic play night after night, year after year? The script was considered just as hackneyed in those days, and the question was the same then as it is today. “The answer, of course, was my father,” Eugene O’Neill explained toward the end of his own career. “He had a genuine romantic Irish personality—looks, voice, and stage presence—and he loved the part. … Audiences came to see James O’Neill in Monte Cristo, not Monte Cristo.”¹⁰

O’Neill’s vocal contempt for his father’s play once he’d grown old enough to have such opinions would be echoed by him years later in a speech by the guileless Marco Polo in the historical satire Marco Millions (1928). At one point, Marco repeats the lackluster word “good” six times to emphasize his bourgeois tastes: “There’s nothing better than to sit down in a good seat at a good play after a good day’s work in which you know you’ve accomplished something, and after you’ve had a good dinner, and just take it easy and enjoy a good wholesome thrill or a good laugh and get your mind off serious things until it’s time to go to bed” (CP2, 431). Shakespeare similarly derided plays designed “to ease the anguish of a torturing hour” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while in O’Neill’s earliest satire, Now I Ask You (1916), Lucy Ashleigh, a pretentious adorer of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), argues against attending vaudeville shows because “those productions were concocted with an eye for the comfort of the Tired Business Man” (CP1, 451).

Some of the earliest words O’Neill remembered his father uttering were “The theater is dying.” James in fact came to regard his good fortune as a “curse” that had barred him from true theatrical greatness. Although O’Neill later believed that he alone had been told of this family curse, James had been quite open to the press about it. In 1901, for instance, a reporter ran into him in Broadway Alley and asked about his future plans. “My private secretary informs me that I have played Dantes four thousand times,” James said. “I have struggled to elaborate my repertoire, but what can a man do when his greatest measure of success seems to lie in a familiar rut? When a treadmill is grinding out big profits, you know, it is rather difficult to step from it.”11

In fact, the curse of Monte Cristo had bedeviled the actor as far back as 1885, before he’d even bought the rights to the Fechter script. Just after his second son Edmund’s death, when James was at his most emotionally fragile, he was approached by a meddlesome reporter in a Chicago wine bar and, with his guard carelessly down, confided everything. The article offers a detailed exposition on the “improvidence” of actors like James, whose “great promise has never been realized” and recounts James’s wistful, wine-soaked grief for his “early days,” when “Jimmy O’Neill” “performed Iago to Booth’s Othello with an aptness and clearness of conception that all but eclipsed the star himself.” “And yet, in spite of all his successes in the ‘legitimate,’” the reporter went on, “he forsook the higher walks of the drama, adopting melodramatic roles which are ephemeral as the day when compared with the true art in which he had given such promise.”¹² For the remainder of his life, James lamented his choice of profits over the nobler pursuits of the stage. “That’s what caused me to make up my mind that they would never get me,” O’Neill said after learning of this. “I determined then that I would never sell out.”¹³

Ella O’Neill, like her husband, James, was born into a first-generation Irish home. Her parents, Thomas and Bridget Quinlan, were also famine refugees, but Thomas thrived in the United States as a tobacco and liquor merchant in Cleveland, Ohio. Ella met the impossibly handsome James, who was twelve years her senior and by then a sought-after bachelor, in 1872 through her father, Thomas, whom James had befriended at the Quinlans’ liquor shop, a popular hangout for performers within a short walk of the city’s Academy of Music. Ella and James were married five years later and had three sons together—James Jr. in 1878, Edmund Burke in 1883, and Eugene Gladstone in 1888. (Charles Fechter, not incidentally, had anglicized Dumas’s hero’s name from “Edmond” to “Edmund.” James’s older brother, named Edward after their father, had died in battle during the Civil War. But James didn’t choose to name his first two sons after his father or his brother, whose veteran’s pension had sustained their mother Mary. Rather, he named them in effect after his dual personae, offstage and on: James and Edmund.)14

On March 4, 1885, at four o’clock in the morning, Edmund, only eighteen months, died.¹⁵ The death of a child is an unimaginable horror for any parent, of course, but the cause of his death was especially shocking. The O’Neills had left Edmund and Jamie, as they called their firstborn, in New York under the care of Ella’s mother, Bridget, while James was performing in Colorado. Jamie contracted measles in their absence, and the obstreperous six-year-old was under his grandmother’s strict orders not to come in contact with his little brother. He went into the child’s bedroom anyway, and only a few days later Edmund succumbed to the disease. Ella returned to New York by train straight away while James stayed on to finish the tour. “The vast audience,” reported the Denver Tribune-Republican the night Ella departed, “did not know that James O’Neill … was heartbroken. It did not know that at that moment his little child lay dead in far distant New York, and that the agonized mother had just taken a tearful farewell of him to attend the burial of the little one. It laughed and clapped its hands and paid no thought but to the actor’s genius, and dreamed not of the inward weeping that was drowning his heart.”¹⁶

O’Neill became convinced in the years to follow that his mother never forgave his older brother Jim, as he called him, for infecting Edmund; and he himself suffered from a tormenting mixture of survivor’s guilt and death envy, later naming his autobiographical character in Long Day’s Journey “Edmund” and the dead child “Eugene.” The reversal of names in the play appears to have an even deeper symbolic meaning for the mother, Mary Cavan Tyrone, who makes clear that she gave birth to her third son to replace the deceased Eugene, and only at the insistence of her husband James (CP3, 766). Hence O’Neill proposes that his birth was no more than a mistake made out of desperation and that his existence in her eyes was a bedeviling reminder of her guilt over Edmund. It’s no wonder, then, that O’Neill later wrote down, without explanation and despite the fact that his mother was a practicing Catholic, that he’d been born in the wake of “a series of brought-on abortions.”17 “I knew I’d proved by the way I’d left Eugene [Edmund] that I wasn’t worthy to have another baby,” Mary Tyrone says to James while high on morphine, “and that God would punish me if I did. I never should have borne Edmund [Eugene]” (CP3, 766).

Mary Ellen “Ella” Quinlan O’Neill.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

Worse still, perhaps, a hotel doctor prescribed Ella O’Neill morphine for the intolerable pain of giving birth to Eugene, an eleven-pound baby, thus precipitating a drug addiction that would last for well over two decades and haunt Ella and the O’Neill men to all of their deaths. This was the guilt-ridden, blame-laden family substructure that O’Neill would lay bare in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a play, he wrote, “of old sorrow, written in tears and blood … with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones” (CP3, 714).

O’Neill toured with his parents around the American theater circuit for the first seven years of his life. “Usually a child has a regular, fixed home,” he said decades later, “but you might say I started in as a trouper. I knew only actors and the stage. My mother nursed me in the wings and in dressing rooms.”18 But like any average American lad, one of his earliest memories involved … what else? Cowboys and Indians. Most small boys from the Northeast became enraptured by the romantic lure of the Wild West by reading dime novels and magazines. O’Neill’s father brought him right to the source.

James O’Neill’s advance man, George C. Tyler, marveled at the storybook figures his boss fraternized with across the West. On any given night, Tyler said, he would find James in a saloon chatting with “the biggest poker player in the United States, or Buffalo Bill Cody or somebody like that—the biggest guns in any walk of life were a natural part of his background.”¹⁹ Indian-related violence in the Montana Territory had abated after the Great Sioux War (1876–77), and James, the prosperous showman and Civil War veteran Nate Salsbury, and Colonel William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody together held lucrative shares in a Montana ranch called the Milner Cattle Company. So the three men communed together at barrooms whenever they chanced to find themselves performing in the same Western town.

In his adult years, O’Neill calculated that he’d been around two years old and near death from typhoid in a Chicago hotel room when Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other Sioux “hostiles” from the Dakota Territory gathered around his sickbed. He remembered feather headdresses and blankets draped across imposing, longhaired heads and “big brown” bodies. One of James O’Neill’s associates had indeed assembled a troupe of Sioux performers from William Cody’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to offer the child some respite from the stomach cramps, headaches, and soaring temperatures with which typhoid assails its victims. O’Neill couldn’t recollect the words spoken, though he remembered the visits took place over the course of a month. Whatever was said, this memory—maybe his earliest—“left him with the low-down on Custer,” he told a friend in 1946, “and an acute sympathy for the redman.”20

This makes for a great story. But Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse weren’t there at O’Neill’s sickbed in Chicago. Sitting Bull had performed only one season for William Cody, and that was four years before O’Neill was born. It’s unlikely that Crazy Horse would have submitted to the demeaning behavior expected of Cody’s performers; but in any case, he couldn’t have. Crazy Horse was killed by a prison guard in 1877 after his pyrrhic victory at Little Big Horn. And by the time the O’Neills arrived in Chicago in the late spring of 1891, when Eugene was two and a half, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was on tour in Europe. Cody wouldn’t play Chicago again until 1893 at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition, better known as the great Chicago World’s Fair, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World.²¹ With these facts in mind, the only plausible story is nearly as good as the one O’Neill recalled.

The Chicago run of James’s romantic drama Fontanelle, a welcome thirty-week break from Monte Cristo, opened on March 12, 1893, after which the O’Neill family spent the last week of March “resting” in the Second City before traveling eastward on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1893.²² Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, whose performers had been in town throughout March preparing for their six-month engagement, opened the following day, April 3. (Cody’s act was deemed too mawkish a billing for the official grounds, so the show was performed just outside the gates on the Midway Plaisance leading up to the fair. In the end Cody exacted the perfect revenge for this slight: the Columbian Exposition went bankrupt, while his show took in more than $1 million.) Eugene was four and a half then, which explains his vivid memory of the Indians far better than if he were two or three. Thus O’Neill preceded Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Frederick Douglass, Jack London, Thomas Edison, and countless other illustrious visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair. Of course, they all witnessed the spectacle; O’Neill missed it by a day.

The Indians at O’Neill’s bedside, then, must have been Sioux warriors known as Ghost Dancers, a cohort of holdouts who called for war after the Wounded Knee Massacre left over 150 tribal members—men, women, and children—dead on December 29, 1890. Just three months after Wounded Knee, William Cody made a deal with Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble for the release of a hundred of these Ghost Dancers imprisoned at nearby Fort Sheridan in order to enlist authentic Indians for another European tour. “The Indians at Fort Sheridan are a nuisance,” the press reported, “and it is understood that Secretary Noble was only too glad of an opportunity to get rid of them. … The Indians were, of course, glad to do anything to get out of prison.”23 Among those captured were the Lakota Sioux medicine man Kicking Bear, a veteran of the battle of Little Big Horn, and another Lakota named Short Bull—both leaders of the Ghost Dance resistance. Each of them took Cody up on his offer, and each, it’s safe to say, would have left young Eugene with “the low-down on Custer.”

Nearly two dozen Sioux braves were coerced into playing “savages” for William Cody’s show, and the grotesquery involved was never lost on O’Neill. In a scene in his 1920 play Diff’rent, a spiteful ne’er-do-well mocks a woman for having “dolled” up with “enough paint on her mush for a Buffalo Bill Indian” (CP2, 36). Other than that, O’Neill only once addressed the plight of the American Indian in his plays. The Fountain (1922), his first historical drama and a failure at the box office, follows the adventures of the sixteenth-century explorer Juan Ponce de León, who joined Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. Juan is nearly killed in Florida by Seminoles. O’Neill depicts the Native tribesmen, like the novelist James Fenimore Cooper a century before him, as a proud and defiant but ultimately doomed people.

O’Neill related his memory of the Sioux visits over fifty years later in a New York penthouse amid frenzied preparations for the premiere of The Iceman Cometh, testifying to the impact of the experience on both his creative imagination and his politics. He passionately spoke out against the injustices visited upon Native tribes by the government, and he would shock an unsuspecting reporter at the time by delighting over the conclusion of Custer’s Last Stand: “The great battle in American history was the Battle of Little Big Horn. The Indians wiped out the whitemen, scalped them. That was a victory in American history. It should be featured in all our school books as the greatest victory in American history.”24

O’Neill’s friend the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote about the tale’s evocation of the playwright’s cynicism that the American Dream was an insidious myth. “In so far as O’Neill has written of American life,” Sergeant’s unpublished notes on the subject read, “he has written its un-success story, discussed the places where the American dream has broken down into something rather raw and unacceptable.”²⁵ Another interviewer took note of two paintings on the walls of his penthouse, one of a clipper ship and one of Broadway at theater hour. “There’s the whole story of the decline of America,” O’Neill told him. “From the most beautiful thing America has ever made, the clipper ship, to the most tawdry street in the world.”²⁶

No single American more than William F. Cody trumpeted the virtues of Euro-American expansion across North America, and his legend only grew, long after his death in 1917, with the heightened mood of triumphalism that followed World War II. And no single writer could have done more to dispel the myth of those very same virtues than Eugene O’Neill, the wide-eyed child gazing up at those “big brown” figures looming over his sickbed in a Chicago hotel room.

School Days of an Apostate

Ella and James O’Neill settled on New London, Connecticut, as their permanent town of residence in 1885. Conveniently located halfway between the theatrical centers of New York and Boston, the whaling city turned summer resort was a sensible choice. Ella’s cousins on her mother’s side, the Sheridans and the Brennans, had lived in New London for some time, and James had theater friends who owned summer homes there as well. Second in importance only to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the heyday of the whale oil trade, New London is situated at the mouth of the Thames River, a tidal estuary that connects points inland to Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. During the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold, then a British officer, personally orchestrated the town’s desolation by fire in one of the infamous traitor’s most vicious acts of betrayal against the revolutionary forces. But the townspeople rebuilt and soon after transformed the waterfront into a patchwork of multitiered clapboard, red brick, and granite shops and dwellings, bestowing on the port city one of the more picturesque skylines in New England.

New London’s economy foundered after the Civil War, by which time whale oil had been replaced by petroleum and natural gas; ever since, the citizenry of the “large small-town,” as O’Neill refers to it in Ah, Wilderness! (CP3, 5), has taken the fantasy of an imminent “renaissance” for granted. Real estate in New London was thus considered a strong bet in the late nineteenth century, and James O’Neill, with his Irishman’s faith in the surety of land to ward off poverty, was game to try his luck. After buying and inhabiting several rental properties, by the summer of 1900, when Eugene was eleven, the family occupied a Victorian-style residence at 325 Pequot Avenue. Horse-drawn carriages clopped back and forth along the west bank of the Thames from the majestic Pequot House resort hotel and the Pequot Summer Colony, the bailiwick of the town’s most elite families, to the downtown “Parade” a couple of miles north. For a few thousand dollars, James had Monte Cristo Cottage, as the house was soon called, renovated and enlarged using the abandoned structures of a schoolhouse and a general store. The O’Neills would spend their summers there, from June to September, for the next two decades. Monte Cristo Cottage was as close as the family would ever come to a true home.

When O’Neill was in his late thirties, he sketched out a diagrammatic account of his childhood development using what the founder of American psychiatry Adolf Meyer called a “life chart.”27 (Today a similar tool is referred to as a genogram.) O’Neill’s psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton believed the exercise might help his patient at long last understand the painful and abiding resentments he’d clung to since childhood; in that way, perhaps, he might be released from over two decades of bondage to alcohol, which had by that time become untenable. O’Neill revealed in his chart that as a toddler, it was his English nurse Sarah Sandy, not his aloof mother Ella, who’d provided him with “mother love.” Sandy also brought him to novelty museums that displayed “mal-formed wax dummies” and enjoyed watching as the boy recoiled in horror. The nurse also, perversely, instilled in him an acute fear of darkness as a result of the ghoulish “murder stories” she delighted in telling before turning out his lights at bedtime, after which she coddled him with motherly love as he howled in fear. “Father would give child whiskey + water to soothe child’s nightmares caused by terror of dark,” O’Neill recalled in his chart. “This whiskey is connected with protection of mother—drink of hero father.”²⁸

Eugene O’Neill in New London. Photo signed to “Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.”

(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

Sarah Sandy was relieved of duty in the fall of 1895, not because of her unorthodox ideas of child rearing but rather because Eugene, not yet seven years old, was sent to St. Aloysius Academy in the Bronx, where he was instructed for four years by the Sisters of Charity. This point on O’Neill’s life chart reads, “Resentment + hatred of father as cause of school (break with mother). … Reality found + fled from in fear—life of fantasy + religion in school—inability to belong to reality.”29 O’Neill looked back on his exile as a cruel act of abandonment on the part of his parents, though his brother Jim had fared much better: he too was sent away before he turned seven, to Notre Dame’s preparatory school in South Bend, Indiana, but while there he blossomed socially and academically. It was a period of success for Jim that would constitute a painful reminder of his wasted intellectual potential once he reached adulthood.

Eugene O’Neill with James O’Neill Jr. and James O’Neill, left to right, in 1900 on the porch of Monte Cristo Cottage.

(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

In 1900, O’Neill entered Manhattan’s De La Salle Institute on Central Park South and boarded with his family close by at a rented apartment on West Sixty-Eighth Street. One afternoon, arriving back from school early, he walked in on his mother holding a hypodermic needle. Indignant over the disruption, Ella accused him of spying; with little explanation, he was sent back to De La Salle the following fall as a boarder rather than a day student.30 A year later, O’Neill transferred to Betts Academy, a prep school in Stamford, Connecticut.

One summer night in 1903 after his freshman year of high school, the fourteen-year-old Eugene, his brother Jim, and his father all looked on, horror-stricken, as Ella made a desperate attempt on her life. Having run out of morphine, she ran headlong, wearing only a nightgown and shrieking like a madwoman, toward the Thames River across Pequot Avenue. The men rushed after her and stopped her before she could leap from the dock. James and Jim had been aware of Ella’s “problem” for years; but they had, right up to that moment, kept the truth from Eugene. “Jamie told me,” Edmund recounts bitterly of the incident in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “I called him a liar! I tried to punch him in the nose. But I knew he wasn’t lying. (His voice trembling, his eyes begin to fill with tears.) God, it made everything in life seem rotten!” (CP3, 787).

O’Neill’s life chart makes it clear that this traumatic revelation triggered an instantaneous “discovery of mother’s inadequacy,” and here the “mother love” line on the chart drops off. The shock of Ella’s drug addiction, which in O’Neill’s mind was reserved for prostitutes and derelicts (though morphine use was endemic among well-heeled women at the time), along with the possibility that she might be insane, activated an addiction of the young man’s own: alcoholism,which began when he was fifteen and was eagerly reinforced by his ne’er-do-well brother Jim.³¹ (Only his parents and close family relations referred to him as “Jamie”; after O’Neill’s adolescence, he unvaryingly calls him “Jim.”) Jim also arranged for his younger brother’s loss of virginity to a prostitute in a two-bit Manhattan brothel. “Gene learned sin more easily than other people,” he boasted years after this event, which was severely traumatizing for his teenage brother. “I made it easy for him.”32 “The girls were such terrible creatures they forced whiskey down his throat,” O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, related of the incident decades later: “with Jamie helping them,” according to Monterey, “they tore off his clothes—he was fighting them. He wasn’t ready for that. He was reading a lot of poetry in those days. But later on he made himself at home in them, in the whorehouses.”³³

Alcohol, often combined with sex, became a psychic painkiller for O’Neill, and over the years, drunkenness and even hangovers occupied his imagination as more reliable companions than the people who ostensibly loved him. For over two decades, O’Neill would drink himself into a stupor from morning to night, then dry out for weeks at a time in a state of utter loneliness and despair.

O’Neill also openly renounced his parents’ Catholicism after his mother’s breakdown—all religions, in fact—and became a confirmed atheist. “He rejected God,” O’Neill’s onetime girlfriend the Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day wrote soon after his death. “He turned from Him.” That first Sunday morning after his mother’s attempt on her life, O’Neill refused to join his parents for Mass. A fight erupted between Eugene and James on the staircase in the front hall until the full-bodied James, who could have handily drubbed his son, abruptly stopped, straightened his cuffs, and said, “Very well. The subject is closed.”³⁴ Though Ella would eventually conquer her morphine habit for good in 1917, thanks in part to the Sisters of Charity, her son never looked back.

O’Neill’s loss of faith was truly a loss—a profound emptiness, a breach in spirit. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill dramatizes a period when his mother had given up Mass as well. Her character, Mary Tyrone, longs to return to her convent schooldays when she embraced Catholicism. “If I could only find the faith I lost,” she laments, “so I could pray again!” (CP3, 779). In the final scene, locked in a morphine-induced dream state, Mary searches helplessly through the living room for something she’s misplaced, “something I need terribly. I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can’t have lost it forever, I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope” (CP3, 826). O’Neill himself experienced this desperate search for hope and spirit. Had he been able to regain his Catholic faith, and his mother’s affection, or find a meaningful substitute, he would have felt safer and less alienated through life—but it’s more than likely he would never have achieved his stature as an artist.

The Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic made up his mind in the third century B.C. to cast off his worldly possessions and live the rest of his days in a bathtub. O’Neill viewed the tedium of life as a teenager at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London as even less exciting than this “Cynic Tub.” O’Neill would read in the morning, swim in the Thames in the afternoon, and read again at night, with little variation for weeks. Although his peripatetic childhood on the road instilled a powerful urge to find a “home” in the truest sense, it also intensified his view of Connecticut’s cultural life as impossibly parochial. At sixteen, he sneeringly claimed that each passing hour in New London was “equivalent to ten in any other place.” “Bored to death” with the dance “hops” at the Pequot House down the road, O’Neill would grumble that at least “in a graveyard there is some excitement in reading the inscriptions on the tombstones.”35

A welcome respite from this drowning ennui arrived in the summer of 1905 in the form of Marion Welch, a well-read teenager from the state capital of Hartford. Visiting a friend in New London that July, Welch was a couple of years older than Eugene, athletically built and, most important, intellectually curious. O’Neill would always think of their days together in his rowboat on the Thames as some of the happiest of his life. The surviving love letters to Marion read like those of a typical lovesick sixteen-year-old boy—thick with sarcasm and braggadocio, more Tom Sawyer than Baudelaire (that would come later). Written to impress more than woo, the letters boasted of joining his wayward brother Jim to bet on the “ponies,” play the slot machines, and carouse generally in upstate New York at Canfield’s Saratoga Club, “a refined name for one of the most fashionable (and notorious) gambling joints in the world.” He regarded Welch as his intellectual peer, and their letters over the course of their short-lived relationship reveal what books they were reading, which they planned to read next, and which weren’t worth reading at all. They shared what plays to see too: “So you went to see the old worm eaten Monte Cristo,” he responded to a letter from Marion. “It may be all right for those who have never seen it before.”36

Graduating from Betts Academy in the following spring of 1906, O’Neill next entered Princeton University, where he was determined to make up for lost time in New London and Stamford. His fellow students remembered him as a “loner,” though sarcastic and “foul-mouthed.” Most college boys in those days drank beer or wine; O’Neill, who was also a heavy smoker by this time, drank hard liquor, a choice his to-the-manner-born classmates associated with “bums.” O’Neill made them cringe with his blasphemy, and he regarded the school’s mandatory Sunday sermons as “so irritatingly stupid that they prevented me from sleeping.” On at least one occasion O’Neill, who by eighteen was nearly six feet tall, stood up on a chair and crowed at the ceiling with arms outstretched, “If there be a God, let Him strike me dead!” (Witnesses to this recalled that his ethnic pride surpassed his atheism, however, and “if anyone spoke disparagingly of Catholicism he would spring furiously to its defense.”)³⁷

For the most part O’Neill kept a low profile during his first semester, when he was a resident of University Hall, now Holder Hall, and few Princetonians could claim they knew him well (though he was nicknamed “Ego” for his lack of humor concerning all things Eugene Gladstone O’Neill). His study was decorated with a fisherman’s net festooned with cork floats and sundry souvenirs, including, according to a fellow dormer, “actresses’ slippers, stockings, brassieres, playbills, posters, pictures of chorus girls in tights … and a hand of cards, a royal flush. But what got me was that among all this stuff he had hung up several condoms—they looked like they’d been used. Very gruesome.” The remainder of his suite contained a simple round table and chairs and a cramped bedroom with an iron cot, a washbowl, a water pitcher, and a commode. He retained his voracious reading habits, and he wrote some poetry, though not of the “highbrow” sort. One typical bit of doggerel composed during his short-lived period at the Ivy League school went something like this:

Cheeks that have known no rouge,

Lips that have known no booze,

What care I for thee?

Come with me on a souse,

A long and lasting carouse,

And I’ll adore thee.38

Pressed by classmates as to why he preferred the “stinking garbage pail” over a vase of fragrant roses, O’Neill replied enigmatically, “Both are nature,” a phrase that brings to mind one of O’Neill’s literary heroes, the French journalist and naturalist author Émile Zola. “When I go into the sewer, I go to clean it out,” the Norwegian “father of modern realism” Henrik Ibsen complained. “When Zola goes into the sewer, he takes a bath.” Zola countered such attacks by citing the physiologist Claude Bernard who, when asked about his “sentiments on the science of life,” responded that “it is a superb salon, flooded with light, which you can only reach by passing through a long and nauseating kitchen.”³⁹

Broadly speaking, “realism” refers to the nineteenth-century revolt against melodrama and romanticism toward dramas that end with calculated ambiguity and reflect the contemporary lives of run-of-the-mill characters who, unlike in naturalism, exhibit free will. (It was this movement, led by Ibsen, that precipitated the end of the soliloquy.) “Naturalism” vaguely connotes a grittier, more perverse form of realism in common theater parlance. But once we remove realistic “slice-of-life” plays that share the “fourth-wall” illusion of most naturalistic dramas, naturalism distinguishes itself as a tradition of tragic endings, the exposure of sublime truths existing beneath surface realities, and the philosophical idea that individuals’ fates are determined by biological, historical, circumstantial, and psychological forces beyond their control. O’Neill’s future dramas would conflate naturalism with other techniques, but the naturalist tradition nearly always predominates.⁴⁰

On the weekends, O’Neill divided his time between boozing at “Doc” Boyce’s nearby tavern and another local dive on Alexander Street with a noxious atmosphere that only he among his classmates could apparently stomach. But, as he had while at Betts, he also commuted to New York City every chance he got. He attended Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that spring at the city’s Bijou Theatre on ten successive nights. Though as a playwright O’Neill would follow Zola’s naturalist path, Ibsen’s revolt against Victorian convention spoke to O’Neill more than any play he had yet seen: “That experience discovered an entire new world of the drama for me. It gave me my first conception of a modern theatre where truth might live.”41

Louis “Lou” Holladay, a New Yorker O’Neill had met during a sojourn to the city, arrived at Princeton’s campus one weekend armed with a handgun and a quart of absinthe, a potent liquor distilled from the toxins of the wormwood plant. O’Neill was enthralled by the hallucinogenic properties of the soon-to-be outlawed drink; he’d read about it in Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890) by the British novelist Marie Corelli and asked Holladay to bring a bottle down from the city. After consuming too much of the green-hued tincture in his room, O’Neill turned “berserk”—smashing furniture, hurling a chair through his window, and aiming Holladay’s revolver at its owner, then pulling the trigger. Luckily, the gun wasn’t loaded. It took three classmates to pin him down, tie him up, and heave him into bed.⁴² No lessons were learned, however, and his heavy drinking and unruly behavior only worsened that winter and spring.

O’Neill left the distinct impression among his classmates that he’d derived his cynicism from his “wild” and “worldly” older brother Jim. “There is not such a thing as a virgin after the age of fourteen,” O’Neill told them, sounding much like his brother; although when he dated a local girl from Trenton, the closest urban center to Princeton’s campus, he would “expiate in high dudgeon” if anyone uttered a disrespectful word about her. Once he took a couple of Princeton students to New York’s Tenderloin district, where the notorious Haymarket bar was located on the same block as an assortment of brothels in which he’d been initiated by Jim. (“Those babes gave me some of the best laughs I’ve ever had, and to the future profit of many a dramatic scene,” O’Neill said later.) His companions got cold feet and hastily retreated back to school.43

Late that spring semester, 1907, O’Neill went on a drunken spree through Trenton with a pack of like-minded students, and they missed the last trolley to Princeton. Instead, they caught the train to New York, which dropped them off at Princeton Junction; but the drawbridge was up, and they had to swim across Carnegie Lake. When a dog started barking on a railroad embankment leading down to a group of houses, O’Neill, drunk as a lord, began hurling stones at the animal. As the dog’s fury grew, so did O’Neill’s, and one of his stones went wide of its mark and crashed through a window of the house. Undeterred, he threw outdoor furniture next, thus rousing from bed the homeowner, a division superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The boys were suspended for three weeks.⁴⁴

O’Neill’s academic standing had already been declining precipitously, and the incident proved a convenient excuse to end relations between O’Neill and the hallowed Ivy League school. (This would not be a permanent break, as decades later O’Neill would donate to its library a substantial cache of his manuscripts and letters.) “Princeton was all play and no work,” O’Neill said, “so much so that the Dean decided I had, by enormous application, crowded four years’ play into one, and he graduated me as a Master Player at the end of that year.” No love was lost between the two parties, nor was expulsion from college new to the O’Neill family: a decade earlier, Jim had been attending Fordham University, a Jesuit school, when he was expelled for hiring a prostitute, then introducing her to classmates and at least one priest on campus as his sister. At Princeton, O’Neill had been charged with “conduct unbecoming a student.” When asked later by a reporter why he was thrown out, he just chuckled and said, “General hell-raising.”⁴⁵

Anarchist in the Tropics

James O’Neill landed his unrepentant son a position that summer making $25 a week in Manhattan as a secretary at the mail order house of the New York–Chicago Supply Company. O’Neill held the position for nearly a year but, he said, “never took it seriously.”46 His friend Lou Holladay’s sister Paula, known as Polly, ran a café on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village that catered to the Village’s burgeoning avant-garde artistic and bohemian set. Without responsibility or purpose, O’Neill referred to this time as his “wise guy” period.⁴⁷

Along with frequenting Polly’s, O’Neill and Holladay combed the bars and brothels of the Tenderloin district and soaked up the music of the era, O’Neill thus initiating his lifelong obsession with ragtime piano and early jazz. They also formed a close relationship with Benjamin R. Tucker, an iconoclastic publisher and editor of the anarchist journal Liberty. Tucker’s Unique Book Shop at 502 Sixth Avenue near Thirtieth Street was a preferred haunt for the growing cohort of what one reporter characterized as “well dressed, seemingly well-educated young men, whose mental processes have led them into out of the way or unconventional channels.”⁴⁸ Tucker dedicated his life to promoting intellectual freedom and preached, in opposition to the “Communist anarchism” of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, nonviolent social and political protest. O’Neill thus adopted what became his only self-professed, lifelong worldview: “philosophical anarchism,” also known as “individualist anarchism” or “egoism.”

Philosophical anarchists maintained three chief principles: unconditional nonviolence, one-on-one instruction rather than mass propaganda, and the complete disregard of all social and political institutions (the press, organized religion, government, law enforcement, the military) as “phantasms,” “ghosts,” or “spooks” to exorcise from one’s mind. This last became a unifying theme in nearly all of O’Neill’s work. The anarchist Hartmann in O’Neill’s early play The Personal Equation (1915), for instance, refers to American notions of “fatherland or motherland” as a “sentimental phantom,” and he goes on to say that “the soul of man is an uninhabited house haunted by the ghosts of old ideals. And man in those ghosts still believes!” (CP1, 321). Over a decade later, O’Neill’s character Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude (1927) snarls at her upright friend Charlie Marsden about her desperate attempt to “believe in any God at any price—a heap of stones, a mud image, a drawing on a wall, a bird, a fish, a snake, a baboon—or even a good man preaching the simple platitudes of truth, those Gospel words we love the sound of but whose meaning we pass on to spooks to live by!” (CP2, 669). And by the 1930s, in his Faustian mask play Days Without End (1933), the protagonist’s masked doppelgänger scorns his alter ego’s longing for the “old ghostly comforts” of religion (CP3, 161).49

Tucker’s Unique Book Shop offered over five thousand volumes of what its proprietor advertised as “the most complete line of advanced literature to be found anywhere in the world,” and O’Neill later professed that his access to this eclectic library through this period had unalterably molded his “inner self.” Tucker translated a good deal of this outlaw literature for the first time into English and debuted American editions through his independent press; but he made a point to champion American philosophies as well: Thomas Jefferson’s suspicion of government power, Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience, and the intrepid poet Walt Whitman’s heightened individualism and lyrical call for radical democracy. The good gray poet responded in kind. “Tucker did brave things for Leaves of Grass when brave things were rare,” Whitman said. “I could not forget that. … I love him: he is plucky to the bone.”⁵⁰

But the most vital source of Tucker’s philosophy could be found in the German philosopher Max Stirner’s radical manifesto The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual against Authority (1844), a volume listed on Edmund Tyrone’s bookshelf in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Tucker had been obsessing over The Ego and His Own at the time O’Neill regularly frequented his shop in 1907, and his imprint published its first English translation that same year. Saxe Commins, the notorious anarchist Emma Goldman’s nephew and later a man O’Neill would identify as one of his “oldest and best of friends,” described Stirner’s book as “an anarchical explosion of aphoristic generalities, defiant and iconoclastic.”⁵¹ Stirner railed against “fixed ideas” the same way Ralph Waldo Emerson denounced “foolish consistency [as] the hobgoblin of little minds.” The Unique Book Shop stocked volumes by Proudhon, Mill, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Zola, Gorky, Kropotkin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Shaw, but when O’Neill took his New London pal Ed Keefe to Tucker’s store, according to Keefe, O’Neill breezed past several packed shelves and “made” him buy The Ego and His Own.52

This steady drumbeat of the “self” that resounded through the cafés, barrooms, and alleyways of Manhattan emboldened O’Neill to quit his humdrum desk job at the shipping company. In the summer of 1908, scraping by on $7 a week from his father, he rented a studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway with Ed Keefe, the painter George Bellows, and the illustrator Ed Ireland. Early in 1909, the bohemian cabal also lived for a month on a farm O’Neill’s father owned in Zion, New Jersey. As they cooked for themselves and tried to keep warm, Bellows and Keefe painted while O’Neill, according to him, “wrote a series of sonnets” that were little more than “bad imitations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”⁵³

Bellows was a contributor to the radical organ the Masses and a student of the “Ash Can” painter Robert Henri (pronounced “Hen-Rye”).⁵⁴ According to another of his students, Henri was considered a sort of mystic who lectured “with hypnotic effect.” He and other philosophical anarchists taught O’Neill and his cohort that by their example of “owning” their lives, Victorian moralists might follow suit and cease their meddling in the lives of others. The famed Ash Can School of painting was Henri’s invention, and he mentored a number of first-rate artists, including Bellows and a young Edward Hopper. O’Neill thus found himself among true believers in his naturalistic “stinking garbage pail” aesthetic—Henri taught his art students that painting must be “as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter.” That year Bellows completed what would be his most famous painting, Stag at Sharkey’s, which featured an illegal boxing match at Tom Sharkey’s Athletic Club, a work of brutal realism meant to capture, Bellows explained simply, “two men trying to kill each other.”⁵⁵

O’Neill reproduced this art-studio milieu in his first full-length play, Bread and Butter (1914), a tragedy about an artist in desperate revolt against bourgeois tastes. (In this way, Bread and Butter joins the tradition of George du Maurier’s Trilby [1894] and its American counterpart, Stephen Crane’s The Third Violet [1897].) The play’s master painter Eugene Grammont (based on Henri) declaims the philosophical anarchist’s credo to O’Neill’s loosely based alter ego, John Brown: “Be true to yourself … remember! For that no sacrifice is too great” (CP1, 148).

During that summer of 1909, O’Neill made the acquaintance of Kathleen Jenkins, the upright daughter of a respectable Protestant mother. (Her father, an alcoholic, had long ago abandoned them.) George Bellows encouraged the match, certain that O’Neill needed a “nice girl” like her for stability. At first Jenkins was attracted by the idea of a romance with a raffish intellectual like O’Neill, even if he had no job and few prospects for one. “The usual young man sent you flowers, a box of candy, took you to the theater, but mostly,” she said, since O’Neill never had any money, “we talked and walked. … He was always immaculately groomed, in spite of being unconventional; he led a bohemian sort of life. … The books he read were ‘way over my head.’”56 Jenkins was stable but not too “nice,” at least according to the standards of the day. She soon became pregnant, and as a result, they got married in a clandestine ceremony at Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in Hoboken, New Jersey, on October 2, 1909.⁵⁷

James and Ella were soon confronted at their suite at the Prince George Hotel on East Twenty-Eighth Street by Kathleen’s mother, Kate Jenkins, who told them about their children’s secret marriage and demanded to know what they planned to do about it. James was at first startled at Jenkins’s impudence, then infuriated. His solution for ending the relationship was to pack his son off on a mining expedition to Spanish Honduras with a gold-prospecting associate of his, Earl C. Stevens. James and Kathleen accompanied O’Neill to Grand Central Station to see him off on a train to San Francisco, and by his twenty-first birthday, October 16, O’Neill found himself contentedly drifting southward on a banana boat off the coast of Mexico.⁵⁸

Eugene O’Neill with Earl C. Stevens on a banana boat en route to Honduras, October 16, 1909, O’Neill’s twenty-first birthday.

(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

After traveling by mule from Amalpa for nearly a hundred unmapped miles through jungles and mountain passes, O’Neill and Stevens’s party finally arrived at the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. He had passed through stunning territory but was harassed, he reported back to his parents, by an endless horde of fleas and ticks “that burrow under your skin and form sores.” And in spite of his predilection for “the stinking garbage pail,” he found the squalor appalling: “Pigs, buzzard[s], dogs, chickens and children all live in the same room and the sanitary conditions of the huts are beyond belief.”59 The tropical climate, on the other hand, suited him just fine. It never went above eighty-five degrees during the day or below seventy at night. He enjoyed listening to the local bands in town squares while observing the “funny way everyone … struts around with a six-shooter and a belt full of cartridges on their hip—just like a 30 cent Western melodrama.” (O’Neill later penned his own cheap western melodramas, the one-act plays A Wife for a Life in 1913, the first play he ever wrote, and The Movie Man in 1914, and the latter’s 1916 short story version, “The Screenews of War.”) He also embraced the languorous pace of life in Central America: “If we don’t do it today why we can tomorrow—that is the way they seem to feel about it.” To fit in, O’Neill loaded himself down “like an arsenal with ammunition, knives, and firearms” and first cultivated what would become his iconic moustache, a disguise meant for circulating in the plazas, with the goal “to look absolutely as shiftless and dirty as the best of them.”60

O’Neill’s pumped-up spirit of adventure rapidly deflated, however, and after a couple of months he wrote his parents, “I give it as my candid opinion and fixed belief that God got his inspiration for Hell after creating Honduras.” At the same time, the ambiguous nature of his marital responsibilities still nagged at him. “It sure would be some shock to find out I was enduring all this for love,” he wrote them. “Better find out for me.” By Christmas in Guajiniquil, O’Neill was mired in self-pity. He hated the food—the meat rotten, everything fried and wrapped in tortillas, “a heavy soggy imitation of a pancake made of corn enough to poison the stomach of an ostrich”—and inevitably contracted food poisoning; the fleas, gnats, ticks, and mosquitoes had evolved from a mild nuisance to a dreadful plague; and his initial admiration for the Hondurans’ relaxed lifestyle had soured into a bilious contempt: “The natives are the lowest, laziest, most ignorant bunch of brainless bipeds that ever polluted a land and retarded its future. Until some just Fate grows weary of watching the gropings in the dark of these human maggots and exterminates them, until the Universe shakes these human lice from its sides, Honduras has no future, no hopes of being anything but what it is at present—a Siberia of the tropics.”⁶¹

A revolution broke out in Honduras while O’Neill was there, but he reassured his parents that its combatants were “of the comic opera variety and only affect Americans in that they delay the mail.” He begged them to send three pounds of Bull Durham tobacco and some magazines, then ended on a homesick note: “I never realized how much home and Father and Mother meant until I got so far away from them.” O’Neill was bedridden with malaria during his last three weeks in Tegucigalpa. He was given a bed at the American consulate, since the hotels were booked up, and his chills from fever became so relentless that his caretakers draped old American flags over him on top of whatever blankets they could spare. “I looked,” he said later, “just like George M. Cohan,” the American song-and-dance man best known for his performances of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” Many years later, O’Neill tersely summed up the ill-fated expedition: “Much hardship, little romance, no gold.”62

It had been a pleasant afternoon strolling along Fifth Avenue in that May 1910 when Ella O’Neill and a friend saw a nursemaid march by pushing a baby carriage carrying an adorable infant. Her friend instantly recognized the woman as an employee of O’Neill’s mother-in-law, Kate Jenkins. “Did you see that little boy?” she asked, waiting until they’d passed. “That’s your grandson!” O’Neill in fact returned from his exile in the “Siberia of the tropics” right on time for the embarrassingly public arrival of Eugene Jr., on May 5, 1910. Two days later, the New York World ran an article under the exuberant headline “The Birth of a Boy / Reveals Marriage of ‘Gene’ O’Neill / Young Man in Honduras, / Doesn’t Know He Is Dad / May Not Hear News for Weeks / Working at Mine to Win / Fortune for Family.” Another article on May 11 featured a photograph of Kathleen Jenkins with the accusatory caption, “Gene Home, / But Not with Wife.” Kate Jenkins was undoubtedly the source. “It seems impossible,” his mother-in-law was quoted as saying, “that ‘Gene’ is in town and has remained away from his wife and their baby. There must be some mistake, but if there is not, Eugene’s attitude is inexcusable. He knows how we all feel toward him and that he could have come to this house to live any time since his marriage to my daughter. There would have been no ‘mother-in-law’ about it, either, and he knew that. I felt toward him as if he were my own son.” Jenkins then insinuated, not without some basis of truth, that James O’Neill was responsible for keeping the young family apart.⁶³

Kathleen Jenkins with Eugene O’Neill Jr.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

With no game plan or prospects for employment in New York, O’Neill joined his father on a boondoggle to St. Louis, Missouri, for James’s traveling production of The White Sister, another of his numerous though commonly forgotten departures from Monte Cristo over the years. O’Neill slogged along as an assistant manager and security man at the ticket counters; but when they arrived in Boston, he once again fled the country—this time as a passenger on the Norwegian bark Charles Racine, skippered by the highly competent Captain Gustav Waage and bound south for Buenos Aires. The voyage cost James O’Neill $75, no paltry sum given that the ship’s crew earned between $13 and $14 a month.64 Once under way, the Charles Racine sailed for weeks with no land in sight,⁶⁵ during which time O’Neill composed the poem “Free,” his earliest known literary work. (Several years after publishing it in the Pleiades Club Year Book in 1912, he admitted to the club, a hail-fellow-well-met group of bohemian patrons and dilettante practitioners of the arts, that the poem was “actually written on a deep-sea barque in the days of Real Romance.”)66 In the poem, O’Neill acknowledges the deep remorse he felt over his desertion of Kathleen and Eugene Jr. while at the same time revealing a profound spiritual release:

I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame;

I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame;

But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest of my spirit craves,

Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,

’Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.⁶⁷

Time spent with the crew aboard the Charles Racine—“At last to be free, on the open sea, with the trade wind / in our hair”—would instill a lifelong infatuation with a spiritual transcendence he would never achieve again; and the impact of this seminal voyage would find its most lyrical expression in Edmund Tyrone’s monologue from Long Day’s Journey Into Night:

When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. (CP3, 811–12; emphasis added)

The Charles Racine carried over a million feet of lumber below decks, and the overload was lashed to the upper decks and hatches with chains and wiring. The trip lasted sixty-five days, an exceptionally long haul for the heavily trafficked lumber route from Boston to Buenos Aires; if it exasperated the crew, for O’Neill the prolonged trip was a boon. Not only did he take in the stories of the men about their ports of call and commit traditional sea shanties to memory, the voyage also offered him a glimpse of the full range of extreme conditions at sea, without the stabilizing force of engine power, from the stillness of a ship becalmed to terrifying hurricane conditions.68

O’Neill greatly admired the sailors he met onboard, and he later broadened his respect for their straight-talking swagger to include the working classes as a whole: “They are more direct. In action and utterance. Thus more dramatic. Their lives and sufferings and personalities lend themselves more readily to dramatization. They have not been steeped in the evasions and superficialities which come with social life and intercourse. Their real selves are exposed. They are crude but honest. They are not handicapped by inhibitions.”⁶⁹ “O’Neill was well-liked onboard,” said one of the crew of the Charles Racine. “We thought him an interesting strange bird we all loved to talk to.” “It’s strange,” O’Neill wistfully recalled decades later, as death approached, “but the time I spent at sea on a sailing ship was the only time I ever felt I had roots in any place.”⁷⁰

On the afternoon of July 24, 1910, a fierce hurricane pummeled the ship. Captain Waage, alarmed by his barometer’s plummeting descent, noted in his log a “terrific heavy sea. … Some deck cargo—planks—washed over.” From the relative safety of the forecastle alleyway, O’Neill looked on in awe while the crew members relieved one another to stand watch in the crow’s nest. They would pause until a wall of water crashed down on deck, and then, when it had receded into the billowing swells, they sprinted across the slippery deck to the mainmast, while the previous man on watch would climb down and perform the same treacherous maneuver in reverse. The brutal winds had died down by morning only to rematerialize as “violent hurricane squalls” outside Buenos Aires at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, the massive estuary separating Uruguay and Argentina. After this, the deck boy, Osmund Christophersen, asked O’Neill what he thought of the rough weather. “Very interesting,” he replied, “but I could have wished for less of it.”71

Crew of the S.S. Charles Racine.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

Once the Charles Racine had docked safely at Buenos Aires in early August, agents scrambled onboard from local bars and brothels to pass around advertisement cards designed to entice sailors eager to blow off steam after weeks of toil at sea: “Come up to my house, plenty fun, perty girls, plenty dance, three men killed last night.” In due course, after O’Neill checked in at the deluxe Continental Hotel, he trailed the swarm of thirsty seamen down Avenida Roque Sáenz Peña toward Paseo de Julio. It wasn’t long before O’Neill ran short of cash and had to swap the downy beds of the genteel Continental for the debauched thoroughfare’s rigid public benches. The Argentine author Manuel Gálvez depicted the Paseo de Julio much as O’Neill must have first seen it for himself: “His artist’s soul forgot for an instant the penury of his life. Because he found this street fantastic, with its high arcades; its cheap, foul shops; its kaleidoscopes with views of wars and exhibitions of monsters; the dark hotels that rented out dirty beds for occasional lovers; the sinister cellars that stunk of grime and where sailors reeking of booze sang; its whores, who were the dirtiest dregs of society; its vagabonds who slept under the columns of the arches; its sellers of obscene pictures; the nauseating stink of human dirt.”72

For nine squalid months O’Neill worked odd jobs and lived hand-to-mouth, touring the city’s brothels and attending the pornographic “moving pictures” playing in the suburb of Barracas. He ate little and drank all day; if he had enough money, his drink of choice was a jar of gin with a dash of vermouth and soda. If he didn’t, he drank the local beer. “I wanted to be a he-man,” O’Neill said. “To knock ’em cold and eat ’em alive.” Much of his time was spent at a waterfront saloon called the Sailor’s Opera. “It sure was a madhouse,” he recalled. “Pickled sailors, sure-thing race-track touts, soused boiled white shirt déclassé Englishmen, underlings in the Diplomatic Service, boys darting around tables leaving pink and yellow cards directing one to red-plush paradises, and entangled in the racket was the melody of some ancient turkey-trot banged out by a sober pianist.”⁷³

After a month or so “on the beach” (sailor talk for being stuck in port), O’Neill reluctantly looked for more steady employment. He worked for a time as a longshoreman on another square-rigger, the Timandra, whose “old bucko of a first mate was too tough,” he said, “the kind that would drop a marlin spike on your skull from a yardarm.” (The ship appears as the Amindra in The Long Voyage Home, O’Neill’s 1917 one-act about a shanghaied sailor.) He worked brief stints at several other jobs, including at the Westinghouse Electrical Company, “the wool house of a packing plant” at La Plata, and as a repairman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. La Plata was the worst of them; the worst job, in fact, he would ever have. O’Neill was assigned the odious task of sorting raw hides, while the noxious fumes of the carcasses permeated his hair, clothing, nose, eyes, and mouth. He was about to relinquish his post when a warehouse fire saved him the trouble, and the fetid compound burned to the ground. (“I didn’t do it,” he said, “but it was a good idea.”)74 Working for Singer Sewing Machine was only slightly less demoralizing. “Do you know how many different models Singer makes?” the boss asked him at the job interview. “Fifty?” “Fifty! Five hundred and fifty! You’ll have to learn to take each one apart and put it together again.” O’Neill couldn’t bear the mechanical drudgery for long, and he quit. “And then I hadn’t any job at all,” he recollected, “and was down on the beach—‘down,’ if not precisely ‘out.’”⁷⁵

One day a man of O’Neill’s tastes, a socialist and freelance reporter for the Buenos Aires Herald named Charles Ashleigh, walked into a seaman’s café, probably the Sailor’s Opera, and, seeing there wasn’t a vacant table, “picked one where but a single customer was sitting—a rather morose, dark young American.” Ashleigh ordered a schooner of beer and sat quietly listening to a mulatto piano player “pounding out popular tunes.” But after ordering a second schooner, he threw caution to the wind and blurted out, “Good Lord, I’m sick of this. I haven’t talked with a soul all day.” “Nor have I,” replied O’Neill. “Have another drink?” That night they stayed up for hours “talking, talking, talking,” said Ashleigh, about “sailing ships and steamships, Conrad and Yeats, the mountains and ports of South America, politics and the theater.” They also exchanged drafts of each other’s verse “across the sloppy table, read, discussed, criticized.”⁷⁶

For decades scholars believed that none of O’Neill’s writing from Argentina had survived. But in the spring of 1917 at a saloon in Greenwich Village, O’Neill showed Robert Carlton Brown, a fiction writer and editor at the Masses, a poem he said he’d written in Buenos Aires entitled “Ashes of Orchids.”⁷⁷ Unpublished before now, here is the earliest version of this poem, which O’Neill later revised in the summer of 1917 with the new title “The Bridegroom Weeps!”:

There are so many tears

In my eyes

Burning, unshed:

There are so many ashes

In my mouth

Ashes of orchids:

There are so many corpses

In my brain

Of decomposing dreams—

And Columbine, also,

Decomposes!78

“The Bridegroom Weeps!” is O’Neill’s second known literary effort after “Free.” No doubt the poem, like “Free,” was partially inspired by Kathleen Jenkins, but his guilt over her and Eugene Jr. was now combined with his hopelessly dissolute life in Argentina. O’Neill often recycled his own phrasing from the past, and the title would later inform those of his biblical mask play Lazarus Laughed (1926) and, more important, his late masterwork The Iceman Cometh (1939).

A more substantial literary legacy from Buenos Aires materialized in the figure of a young Englishman at the Sailor’s Opera, a man the future playwright later mirrored in Smitty, the antihero of his 1917 one-acts The Moon of the Caribbees and In the Zone. O’Neill regularly observed his future inspiration “sopping up all the liquor in sight, and between drunks he’d drink to sober up. He almost caused an alcoholic drought in Buenos Ayres.”⁷⁹ In his midtwenties, blond, and “extraordinarily handsome,” Smitty was, O’Neill said, “almost too beautiful … very like Oscar Wilde’s description of Dorian Gray. Even his name was flowery.” O’Neill describes him in The Moon as “a young Englishman with a blonde mustache” who speaks to other sailors “pompously” and exudes an attitude of unearned entitlement (CP1, 528, 538); the actual Smitty was similarly an aristocratic, college-educated, former member of a “crack British regiment,” according to O’Neill, who “suddenly messed up his life—pretty conspicuously.”⁸⁰

Smitty had escaped to Buenos Aires to evade a scandal at home, and though armed with letters from British dignitaries to Argentine counterparts, he was deathly afraid that someone might offer him a job, so he kept the letters to himself.81 One drama critic quipped that O’Neill’s fictional character was “an uninteresting young man,” but this was precisely O’Neill’s point.⁸² The true hero of The Moon of the Caribbees, chronologically the first of his S.S. Glencairn series of one-act sea plays, was not Smitty, O’Neill clarified, but rather “the spirit of the sea—a big thing.” Smitty went to sea to forget his past, and he drinks to forget it too. But everything the sea offers in the play—the drink, the music, the local women, the moonlight—combines to become a potent reminder of a life half lived. Oblivious to the beauty of the sea and the other sailors’ unselfconscious revelry, Smitty’s “silhouetted gestures of self-pity are reduced to their proper insignificance.” For O’Neill, he’s a hollow “insect” ineffectually buzzing amid the wonder of nature’s “eternal sadness.” Smitty lives his life “much more out of harmony with truth, much less in tune with beauty, than the honest vulgarity of his mates.”⁸³ With the notable exception of Smitty, O’Neill’s maritime plays express nothing but admiration for the seamen he encountered. “I hated a life ruled by the conventions and traditions of society,” O’Neill said. “Discipline on a sailing vessel was not a thing that was imposed on the crew by superior authority. It was essentially voluntary. The motive behind it was loyalty to the ship!”⁸⁴

In due course, O’Neill became fed up with the vagabond lifestyle of a penniless beachcomber, “sleeping on park benches, hanging around waterfront dives, and absolutely alone.” At one point, he was tempted to partner up with an out-of-work railroad man to hold up a currency exchange at gunpoint. O’Neill considered the proposal seriously but turned the hopeless robber down. “He was sent to prison,” he said, “and, for all I know, he died there.” The capture of his would-be accomplice served the future playwright as a keen reminder of life’s fragility in the hands of pitiless circumstance: “There are times now when I feel sure I would have been [a writer], no matter what happened, but when I remember Buenos Aires, and the fellow down there who wanted me to be a bandit, I’m not so sure.”⁸⁵

Exorcism in New York

O’Neill shipped out of Buenos Aires aboard the tramp steamer S.S. Ikala in March 1911, but this time as a seaman, not a passenger. After a brief stopover at Port of Spain, Trinidad (the harbor of which inspired the mise-en-scène for The Moon of the Caribbees), the Ikala docked in New York on April 15. As his poems “Free” and “The Bridegroom Weeps!” indicate, O’Neill’s guilty feelings still lingered over Kathleen Jenkins and Eugene Jr., and by telephone he arranged with Jenkins to stop by and visit his one-year-old namesake. The reunion between husband and wife was civil but awkward; of the few words spoken by O’Neill, none of them justified his behavior over the last year and a half. After a brief stay, he left in silence. O’Neill wouldn’t see Eugene Jr. for more than a decade, and Jenkins he never saw again.86

Given his time in Buenos Aires, O’Neill was far more at home among the denizens of Manhattan’s Lower West Side waterfront district than the respectable uptown neighborhoods his parents and brother inhabited in New York. So he checked in at a boardinghouse and saloon near the docks at 252 Fulton Street, around the corner from where he’d worked as a supply clerk. The other boarders referred to the bar as Jimmy the Priest’s (and a few years later Jimmy’s Place), though officially it was listed as Jimmy’s Hotel and Café.⁸⁷ Such a name for a low saloon like Jimmy’s was doubtlessly intended to boost the perception among the municipal authorities that Jimmy’s was a compliant Raines Law hotel. New York’s Raines Law provided a loophole for serving liquor after hours and on Sundays at establishments located on the ground floor of tenement buildings, but only if they offered rooms for rent on the upper floors and served food. The Raines Law was signed in 1896 as a measure to curb working-class drinking habits and deviancy, but for the most part it had the opposite effect. By requiring that there were rooms that could be used for sleeping off a drunk or conducting illicit assignations, the moral-reform legislation had inadvertently enabled in equal measure binge drinking and prostitution.

James J. Condon, the eponymous proprietor, was a reserved but very tough Irishman. A ship chandler who worked in the building next door recalled that “Jimmy feared nothing. In most bars if a customer turned nasty, the bartender would first try to calm him down, but not Jimmy. The moment he smelled trouble, he’d grab the man, no matter how big he was—Jimmy was tall but thin—and give him the bum’s rush through the swinging doors. He did it so fast he bowled over the toughest characters. There were two steps at the entrance, high stone ones, and sometimes the man would stumble and land flat in the street, yet Jimmy never looked over the doors to see if he was hurt or anything. He’d just return behind the bar, looking as cool as ever—he was a real poker face. I never heard him raise his voice, but you could tell when he had his Irish up.” O’Neill portrayed Condon as a character in “Anna Christie” in similar terms, as a “personage of the waterfront [who], with his pale, thin, clean-shaven face, mild blue eyes and white hair, a cassock would seem more suited to him than the apron he wears. … But beneath all his mildness one senses the man behind the mask—cynical, callous, hard as nails” (CP1, 959).

O’Neill described Jimmy the Priest’s as “a saloon of the lowest kind of grog shop.” To rent a bed upstairs cost $3 a month, which O’Neill paid for out of a dollar-a-day allowance from his father, and the saloon on the first floor served free soup for lodgers and a shot of whiskey or a schooner of beer for a nickel.88 Condon’s signage was a yellow painted glass of beer on the window out front with the words “SCHOONER—5¢.” “I lived there for a time,” O’Neill told a reporter. “You lived down there while you gathered atmosphere?” he was asked. “Hell no,” O’Neill replied. “I was flat.”⁸⁹

Jimmy Condon and his bar did provide the future playwright with an abundance of material, however. O’Neill soaked up Jimmy’s dissolute world the way Jack London had earlier the San Francisco waterfront saloons, as immortalized in one of O’Neill’s favorite books, London’s chronicle of alcoholic despair John Barleycorn: “Alcoholic Memoirs” (1913). O’Neill’s autobiographical character Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night mentions Jimmy’s by name, and the bar also served as the setting of his short story “Tomorrow” (1916) and his plays Chris Christophersen (1919), Exorcism (1919), “Anna Christie,” (1920) and, along with two other bars in New York, The Iceman Cometh. In an early poem, “Ballad[e] of the Seamy Side” (1912), O’Neill rhapsodizes over the freewheeling mode of living at Jimmy’s and its neighboring dives and dance halls:

Where is the lure of the life you sing?

  Let us consider the seamy side. …

Think of the dives on the waterfront

  And the low drunken brutes in dungaree,

Of the low dance halls where the harpies hunt

  And the maudlin seaman so carelessly

Squanders the wages of a month at sea

  And maybe is killed in a bar room brawl;

The spell of these things explain to me—

  “They’re part of the game and I loved it all.”90

By and large, the men at Jimmy’s and those loafing and working around the docks nearby were a “hard lot,” as O’Neill remembered them: “Every type; sailors on shore leave or stranded; longshoremen, waterfront riffraff, gangsters, down and outers, drifters from the ends of the earth.” But O’Neill developed a deep respect for these men: “They were sincere, loyal and generous. In some queer way they carried on. I learned at Jimmy the Priest’s not to sit in judgment on people.”

In less than a year, at least two of the men at Jimmy’s would save his life.⁹¹

Upon returning to the Unique Book Shop that spring, O’Neill learned of the anarchist Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, and Goldman, along with her chief editor, Bayard Boyesen, agreed to print O’Neill’s first published work, “American Sovereign.” That May, the Supreme Court had ruled that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was in violation of the Antitrust Act, and the title of O’Neill’s poem refers to a phrase from a speech made by the “muckraker” Lincoln Steffens, one of the first of a dauntless cohort of fire-eating journalists who in the early decades of the twentieth century denounced the nation’s wealthiest classes and corrupt politicians. The previous December in Greenwich, Connecticut, ironically one of the wealthiest towns in the United States, Steffens asserted the muckraker doctrine that “American sovereignty has passed from our political establishment to the national organization of money, credit, and centralized business.” In “American Sovereign,” O’Neill addresses the vexing riddle of why working-class Americans vote for politicians with only upper-class interests in mind: “This is all the Working Class has reaped—Their efforts help their leaders get the Dough.”92

Jimmy the Priest’s, 252 Fulton Street in New York City, where O’Neill attempted suicide in late 1911. Its official name was Jimmy’s Hotel and Café.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

On July 22, 1911, O’Neill again put his literary aspirations on hold and signed onto an American Line passenger steamer, the S.S. New York. But as with his time on the S.S. Ikala, the transatlantic voyage on the New York offered none of the high romance O’Neill had experienced on the sailing ship Charles Racine, and he later characterized the berth as an “ugly, tedious job, and no place for a man who wanted to call his soul his own. … There was about as much ‘sea glamor’ in working aboard a passenger steamship as there would have been in working in a summer hotel. I washed enough deck area to cover a good-sized town.”93 The New York arrived in Southampton, England, to find that dock laborers and transportation workers had gone on a nationwide strike. O’Neill’s early full-length The Personal Equation depicts the anarchist movement’s involvement in this strike, which was supported by the American labor union the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as “the Wobblies.” Coal stokers and seamen, in an unusual show of solidarity, rose up to support the workers in a brief but reverberating protest that would be remembered by posterity as the Great Labor Strike of 1911.

Stokers and seamen didn’t generally fraternize in this way; in fact, a shipboard class division existed between the two groups that created strains of bitter animosity. And their clash of temperaments as well as job status informed O’Neill’s lifelong conviction about the dehumanizing pitfalls of modern industrialization. In O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1921), for instance, which explores this rift among modern-day seaman, an Irishman named Paddy contrasts a sailor’s life in the sail-powered past to the demoralizing slavery of the industrial present:

Oh to be scudding south again wid the power of the Trade Wind driving her on steady through the nights and days! Full sail on her! … ’Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. ’Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one. (Scornfully) Is it one wid this you’d be, Yank—black smoke from the funnels smudging the sea, smudging the decks—the bloody engines pounding and shaking—wid devil a sight of sun or a breath of clean air—choking our lungs with coal dust—breaking our backs and hearts in the hell of the stokehole—feeding the bloody furnace—feeding our lives along with the coal, I’m thinking—caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo! (CP2, 127)

Once engine designers had introduced triple-expansion engines, shipping costs lowered, and the steamships were three times faster than sail-powered ships. But like Paddy, O’Neill believed that in the days of sail—in contrast to the thankless toil on steamships like the Ikala, the New York, and the ship he took on his return to the United States, the American Line’s S.S. Philadelphia—sailors valued “the spirit of craftsmanship, of giving one’s heart as well as one’s hands to one’s work, of doing it for the inner satisfaction of carrying out one’s own ideals, not merely as obedience of orders. So far as I can see, the gain is over-balanced by the loss.”94

S.S. Ikala.

(COURTESY OF THE PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM, SALEM, MASS.)

By the time of O’Neill’s return voyage to New York on August 26, he’d earned the rank of able seaman, or AB, an achievement that, though his tenure as a working seaman was little more than six weeks total, filled him with pride for the remainder of his life. “Do you want to see something I prize very highly?” O’Neill asked a friend years later. “Wait. I’ll show you.” Shoving aside two gold Pulitzer Prize medals, he produced a tattered AB certificate. “Here it is.”95 Another cherished possession from his days at sea was his blue American Line sweater, an item of memorabilia he saved and wore proudly in the years to come as a reminder of a happier, more liberated time.

Back at Jimmy the Priest’s, O’Neill plunged headlong into a self-described cycle of “great down-and-outness.” He took another room above the bar, this time with a hardened Irish sailor named Driscoll. Driscoll was an American Line “fireman,” or coal stoker, who had served with O’Neill on the S.S. Philadelphia, and he’d appear as the Irishman Driscoll in his S.S. Glencairn series, Lyons in the short story “Tomorrow” and, most notably, as the Irish American antihero Robert “Yank” Smith in The Hairy Ape. “I shouldn’t have known the stokers if I hadn’t happened to scrape an acquaintance with one of our own furnace-room gang at Jimmy the Priest’s,” O’Neill said. “His name was Driscoll, and he was a Liverpool Irishman. It seems that years ago some Irish families settled in Liverpool. Most of them followed the sea, and they were a hard lot. To sailors all over the world, a ‘Liverpool Irishman’ is the synonym for a tough customer.”⁹⁶

Driscoll occupied a grandiose place in O’Neill’s imagination: “a giant of a man, and absurdly strong. He thought a whole lot of himself, was a determined individualist. He was very proud of his strength, his capacity for grueling work. It seemed to give him mental poise to be able to dominate the stokehole, do more work than any of his mates.”⁹⁷ Not much has been uncovered about Driscoll’s past; even his first name has remained a mystery. A few clues have surfaced, however: the initial of Driscoll’s first name was J, and he was five feet seven. He was born in Ireland, not Liverpool, in 1878, and he moved to New York, where he gained American citizenship.⁹⁸ The only Driscoll that passed through Ellis Island and fits this profile is John Driscoll, who arrived in New York in 1899 from Cromore Village in Northern Ireland. Politically, this makes a good deal of sense, given that Yank Smith regards his Protestant Northern Irish engineer on the steamship as a “Catholic moiderin’ [murdering] bastard” (CP2, 137). John Driscoll also had a sister living at 44 Broad Street in New London, O’Neill’s hometown, which might have served as a handy conversation piece between the men at the bar.99

No one was more shocked than O’Neill when he heard a few years later at Jimmy’s that on August 12, 1915, at age thirty-seven, Driscoll leapt overboard into the middle of the North Atlantic while bound west as leading fireman on the S.S. St. Louis on one of its regular round-trip crossings from Liverpool to New York. (This route might explain the confusion about Driscoll being a “Liverpool Irishman.”) Driscoll’s suicide inspired O’Neill to write a short story in 1917 titled “The Hairy Ape,” since lost; and he later revisited the idea in his 1921 play of the same title, this time replacing Driscoll’s actual Irish, a brogue we find in the Glencairn plays, with the accent of a Brooklyn man of the waterfront.¹⁰⁰

O’Neill’s next important roommate at Jimmy’s after Driscoll had gone back to sea was a former press agent of James O’Neill’s, James “Jimmy” Findlater Byth. The forty-four-year-old newspaperman and O’Neill had formed a close friendship while drinking at the Garden Hotel bar around 1907, when James first hired Byth, who at the time was working in New York as a Coney Island amusement park operator. A recurrent figure in the O’Neill canon, Jimmy Byth would serve as the model for James “Jimmy” Anderson in “Tomorrow,” the drunken roommate Jimmy in Exorcism, and, most famously, as James “Jimmy Tomorrow” Cameron in The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill’s first title for this much later play was also “Tomorrow”).

Byth’s character in “Tomorrow” lived in a “dream of tomorrows,” while Iceman’s “Foolosopher,” Larry Slade (based on the Irish anarchist Terry Carlin), refers to Jimmy as “the leader of our Tomorrow Movement” (CP3, 584). In his stage directions for Iceman, O’Neill describes Byth as having a face “like an old well-bred, gentle bloodhound’s. … His eyes are intelligent and there once was a competent ability about him. His speech is educated, with a ghost of a Scotch rhythm in it. His manners are those of a gentleman. There is a quality about him of a prim, Victorian old maid, and at the same time of a likable, affectionate boy who has never grown up” (CP3, 567). Byth was a hack writer as well as press agent who shared O’Neill’s predilection for drink but none of his literary ambition, though he did manage to publish a reminiscence during this period, “Cecil Rhodes,” which recounts his time as a correspondent during South Africa’s Boer War (1899–1902).

Those just looking for a quiet drink who sat down on a barstool next to Byth would be regaled with tales of his adventures as a war reporter embedded with the Boers (Dutch colonialists). Indeed, Byth had friends on both sides in the conflict, and he worked with them closely in the Great Boer War Spectacle. The show premiered at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, where Byth’s job title was vice president and amusement manager, then traveled to Coney Island the following year. The Great Boer War Spectacle was a spectacularly elaborate battle reenactment that, like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which featured actual cowboys and Indians, included veterans who’d fought viciously against one another in South Africa. The New York press release for the show is attributable to Byth, who wrote that the Boer War Company integrated “1,000 men, including 200 Kafirs, Zulus, Matabeles, and representatives of other South African tribes,” and 600 horses trained to feign death. Because of his close friendship with Byth, O’Neill considered South Africa “a country I have always had a strong yen for because in the distant past I was pals with so many of its people, both British Africanders and Boers and really know a lot about it for one who has never been there.” Two of Byth’s associates from the Spectacle, the Boer general Piet Cronjé and the British captain A. W. Lewis, the general manager of the Spectacle, would appear as Piet Wetjoen and Cecil Lewis in The Iceman Cometh.101

By the spring of 1912, O’Neill and Byth had both managed to find their way into print with “Free” and “Cecil Rhodes” in the yearbook of the Pleiades Club, and their contributions are separated, appropriately enough, by the music and lyrics of the “Pleiades Drinking Song.” Two poems in the same collection appear to have influenced The Iceman Cometh. The first, “To-day’s the Time” by William Johnston, warns its readers against languid procrastination:

ONCE YESTERDAY’S gone, it’s mighty far off,

And TO-MORROW’S still further away.

So whatever there is you want to be doing,

You might as well do it TO-DAY.102

Another poem, “Beside the Road” by Madison Cawein, which directly follows Byth’s reminiscence in the book, concludes,

Of hope, whose light makes bright the road,

And beautifies the lonely hours,

And turns the sorrow of our load

To thoughts, like shining flowers.”¹⁰³

Thus from this volume and from Byth’s tales of the Boer War and his Spectacle, O’Neill absorbed much of the rich thematic material that informs The Iceman Cometh and represents the most prominent dramatic motif of his career: the hopeless hope for a better tomorrow.¹⁰⁴

Byth and O’Neill’s room at Jimmy the Priest’s was adorned with piles of books and was “filthy,” as O’Neill remembers it in his stage directions for Exorcism: “The walls and low ceiling, white-washed in some remote past, are spotted with the greasy imprints of groping hands and fingers. The plaster has scaled off in places showing the lathes beneath. The floor is carpeted with an accumulation of old newspapers, cigarette butts, ashes, burnt matches, etc.”¹⁰⁵ Next to them lived a retired telegrapher nicknamed “the Lunger,” a disparaging epithet for someone suffering from tuberculosis; the Lunger appears in O’Neill’s story “Tomorrow,” his one-act Warnings (1913), and his novella S.O.S. (1917). The man would die of the disease, but not before attempting to teach O’Neill the International Code for wireless communication. O’Neill was always too drunk during their sessions, however, and by morning had forgotten everything he learned.¹⁰⁶

O’Neill hadn’t always been belly-up at the bar at Jimmy’s over his cycle of “great down-and-outness.” He had a lover for a time named Maude Williams. Most of the information about her comes from Kathleen Jenkins, who testified in court the following year that Williams lived at 123 West Forty-Seventh Street and that Jenkins possessed “information” confirming that O’Neill had “committed adultery” with Williams “at divers times during the months of June, July, August, and September, 1911.”107 Williams was most likely a small-time actress in musical theater by that name who’s listed in several trade columns as having performed in the variety show A Knight for a Day that past April and in the summer for the “beauty chorus” of the musical farce The Countess Coquette.¹⁰⁸

Late in December 1911, O’Neill attended a performance of the famed Irish Players from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Produced by his father’s former advance man George C. Tyler, the historic tour included plays by John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, T. C. Murray, Lady Augusta Gregory, Lennox Robinson, and George Bernard Shaw, among others. For O’Neill, the Irish Players were a revelation: “[The Irish Players] first opened my eyes to the existence of a real theatre,” he said, “as opposed to the unreal—and to me then—hateful theatre of my father, in whose atmosphere I had been brought up.” “As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theatre. It was seeing the Irish players for the first time that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity.”¹⁰⁹

O’Neill also attended political lectures and raucous beer parties hosted by the avant-garde Ferrer School, one of the “Modern Schools” of the prewar period named for Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer. Over the school’s short-lived existence, 1911 to 1915 (when it was shut down for vocally opposing America’s entry into World War I), its advisory board consisted of some of the era’s most notorious political firebrands—Jack London, Hutchins Hapgood, Upton Sinclair, and Emma Goldman, to name a few. The Ferrer was first housed at 6 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, where it conducted evening and Sunday classes for students aged fifteen to twenty. Tuition was 15¢ a week; if you couldn’t afford that, it was free of charge. The school’s philosophy, according to its director Bayard Boyesen, was that “different natures develop differently.” Contrary to their reputation as dangerous socialists and anarchists, its teachers refused to enforce any “ism.” Instead, they encouraged their students’ intellectual self-discovery in their own time, at their own pace. “Our radicalism finds expression in our modes of teaching, not in imposing any doctrines on the children,” Boyesen told a reporter for the New York Times. “However, I must say that I will be disappointed if any child, after having the facts set before him, does not revolt against the iniquity of the system of government in this and every other country.”110

Like O’Neill, Boyesen was a philosophical anarchist. He had been ousted from his post as a Columbia professor for radicalism, which had earned him the status of a minor celebrity. In a speech given at the Ferrer School in the spring of 1912, he’d pointedly made mention of similar academic careers notoriously cut short: Percy Bysshe Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, Edgar Allan Poe from Virginia, James Russell Lowell from Harvard, James Fenimore Cooper from Yale, and so on. (He might later have added Eugene O’Neill from Princeton.) Boyesen declared that “art above all is unrespectable and unrespecting.” He concluded with a glum appraisal of the state of the arts in the United States, a declaration prophetic of O’Neill’s future as a perpetually banned playwright: “In pure creative art America is giving little or nothing to the world, and if an artist tries to do so it is as likely as not that he will turn some Anthony Comstock [a notoriously powerful moral reformer] loose on him to declare him and all his purposes special creations of the Evil One.”¹¹¹

O’Neill made lasting friendships among the Ferrer’s habitués, including his later editor Manuel Komroff and future Provincetown Player Christine Ell, and he stopped in at the school regularly with buckets of beer to liven up the meetings. According to one attendee, Ell, who had worked as a prostitute in Denver, boasted at one gathering that a taxi driver tried to rape her on the way over.¹¹² She could well have been telling the truth. Ell later dated O’Neill’s brother Jim, and she served as the model for the oversized female lead Josie Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten. O’Neill describes Josie as “five feet eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred and eighty,” “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak” (CP3, 857).

To be granted a divorce in New York State required proof of adultery provided by witnesses. O’Neill obliged. His divorce trial, which he wasn’t required to attend and did not, on June 10, 1912, in White Plains, New York, where Kathleen had relocated, included several testimonies to substantiate the charge of adultery. The following is a summary of the eyewitness accounts of O’Neill’s infidelity: On the night of December 29, 1911, O’Neill met with the legal counsel of Kathleen’s mother, James C. Warren, and his associates Edward Mullen and Frank Archibold, a friend of Archibold’s named Mr. Reel, and O’Neill’s friend the painter Edward Ireland. The co-conspirators gathered for dinner at Ireland’s apartment at 126 West 104th Street, then commenced a bar crawl at the Campus tavern on the same block. Ireland returned home, and the rest headed to Midtown for more drinks at various watering holes. They eventually landed at a brothel around three a.m. at 140 West Forty-Fifth Street, across from the Lyceum Theatre, a couple of blocks up from where O’Neill was born, at which point Mr. Reel departed. After stalling “a short time” in the lobby, O’Neill selected “some girl there that attracted him,” according to Mullen’s testimony, and followed her upstairs.113 Mullen, Warren, and Archibold waited in the lobby for two hours until O’Neill instructed a maid to call them up, whereupon they found O’Neill naked with the prostitute. They had a drink or two, and then, duties fulfilled, left at around half-past six or seven a.m.¹¹⁴ End of testimony. End of marriage.

But on the next evening, December 30, after the events related in the testimony, or possibly it was New Year’s Eve, 1911, James Byth and another boarder at Jimmy the Priest’s, Major Adams, discovered O’Neill half dead in his room. He’d attempted to kill himself with an overdose of the barbiturate veronal. In October 1919, O’Neill recorded the traumatic experience in his one-act play Exorcism. A prequel of sorts to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Exorcism opens in a room at a downtown boardinghouse (Jimmy the Priest’s) with Ned Malloy, O’Neill’s autobiographical protagonist, possessed by demons after committing an odious act. Having just returned from a brothel, Ned recounts to his roommate Jimmy (Byth) a degrading experience he had with a prostitute, whom he’d visited to provide grounds for divorcing his estranged wife. “You know the law in New York,” Ned mutters. “There’s only one ground that goes.”¹¹⁵

“We arrived in the small hours and I was very drunk,” Ned tells Jimmy. “I must have fallen asleep—almost immediately. When I awoke the room was strange to me. It wasn’t dawn, it was mid-day, but it appeared like dawn, with faint streaks of light shedding from the edges of the green shades and the whole room in a sort of dead half-darkness. … The whole thing was no new experience—but I was afraid!” This depiction of a gray dawn spent with a prostitute recalls similar stories associated with O’Neill’s brother Jim, most vividly in A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Jim Tyrone as the protagonist. Both Ned and Jim describe prostitutes as “pigs,” and Ned awakes to a gray light coming in the windows, just as Jim does.116 “I’ve seen too God-damned many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows,” Jim tells Josie in Moon (CP3, 919).

Once alone, Ned swallows a handful of pills, lies down in a fetal position, and mutters, “Well, that’s over.” Several hours later, Jimmy and Major Andrews (Major Adams) find him unconscious and call a doctor. His stomach is pumped, and he’s ordered to walk around the block to revive himself. Ned’s father arrives (though in real life James O’Neill was on tour at the time) and pleads with him to go to a rest cure sanatorium. Surprisingly, Ned agrees and decides that after a period of healing, he’ll move out west to Minnesota. “My sins are forgiven me!” Ned declares. “God judges by our intentions, they say, and my intentions last night were of the best. He evidently wants to retain my services here below—for what I don’t know yet but I’m going to find out—and I feel of use already!” Ned has thus been resurrected from an ignominious end, his demons “exorcised.”¹¹⁷

The discovery of Exorcism in 2011 revealed something buried in Long Day’s Journey Into Night—what’s been missing in Edmund Tyrone, culpability, is all too apparent in Ned Malloy. Ned, a nickname for Edmund, is as autobiographical as Edmund but with considerable differences: Ned is bitter, spiteful, self-absorbed, an emotional bully to friends and family, and insensitive to their deep concern for his well-being. In this way he’s redolent of another close avatar of O’Neill’s, Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown (1925). (Ned’s wife is called Margaret, not coincidentally the name O’Neill later gives Dion’s long-suffering spouse.) Ned, like Jamie Tyrone, uses the word “rotten” to capture the depths of his self-loathing: “Everything I had ever done, my whole life—all life—had become too rotten! My head had been pushed under, I was drowning and the thick slime of loathing poured down my throat—strangling me!”118 Ned, Edmund, Dion, and Jamie Tyrone Jr. in Long Day’s Journey epitomize the O’Neillian archetype of a wounded soul, men so utterly disappointed with themselves and life in general that they take it out on those who love them most—suicide, in Ned and Edmund’s case by pills, in Dion and Jamie’s by alcohol, providing the maximum pain one can inflict upon caring survivors.¹¹⁹ In short, with Exorcism, we are offered a glimpse into the true personality defects of Edmund Tyrone, and thus of O’Neill himself.

For many decades, before the lost script of Exorcism came to light, the only surviving accounts of O’Neill’s actual suicide attempt were those of his friend George Jean Nathan and O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton. Neither has been taken seriously. Their stories are embellished with details of raucous drunken behavior, and both conclude with O’Neill being escorted by drunks at the bar to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. Boulton’s account, when placed beside Exorcism, appears the more legitimate. She quotes O’Neill telling her that upon arriving back from the brothel to Jimmy the Priest’s on the morning of December 30, he’d hoped to find a check from his father. The absent check not only deprived him of the cash he needed to keep his room (and to keep drinking), it also signaled a complete abandonment by his parents—“of this he was sure now.” Boulton adds that O’Neill was troubled that Jim wasn’t there “to talk things over with,” that “he couldn’t stand his thoughts anymore,” that he was disgusted by his night with the prostitute, and that he was regretful for having gotten involved with Jenkins, “who seemed like himself just another pawn of fate.”¹²⁰ For a man with suicidal tendencies, any of these torments might have nudged him over the edge into attempting to reach the serene finality of death. Combined, they were more than sufficient.

O’Neill told Boulton that he spent what money he had (two drinks’ worth) on veronal tablets from several pharmacies in the neighborhood around Jimmy’s. Then he locked the door to his room with a flimsy hook, swallowed the tablets with “a glass of dirty water,” and passed out cold. “I must have been there twenty-four hours, maybe longer,” he said. “I vaguely remembered coming to, hearing a knocking on the door, then silence. … This happened a number of times, but I paid no attention to it. It didn’t occur to me that I was alive—after all those pills! At first I probably thought I was still on my way, not dead yet, but getting there. Perhaps I didn’t think at all, just felt resentful that the veronal hadn’t yet completely put me out and that I could hear the knocks. … Then a horrible thought came to me—I was dead, of course, and death was nothing but a continuation of life as it had been when one left it! A wheel that turned endlessly round and round back to the same old situation!”121

Ned Malloy in Exorcism tells his roommate Jimmy that he went directly from the brothel to Battery Park and remained there six hours. This would validate the date of his actual attempt as December 30 or 31, 1911 (though the play is set in March, the gateway month to spring and thus rebirth). James O’Neill’s check arrived while Eugene was unconscious, and after the rent had been deducted, “drinks were on the house … Wow! What a celebration.”¹²² Boulton’s and Nathan’s stories both conclude with a drunken celebration among O’Neill and his saviors, an anticlimactic if joyful tableau that ends both Exorcism (which was subtitled “A Play of Anti-Climax” at the time of its production in 1920) and The Iceman Cometh.

Kathleen Jenkins never appeared to hold a grudge after the divorce. As O’Neill remarked to his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, “The woman I gave the most trouble to has given me the least.”¹²³ But no one document verifies that admittance more than the script of Exorcism. “I wouldn’t forgive or forget the fact that I despise her,” Ned says, to which Jimmy responds, “But didn’t you—don’t you care for her at all?” “Not a damn!” Ned snaps back. “Not a single, solitary, infinitesimal tinker’s damn! I never did! Body—that was what I wanted in her and she in me. And I married her for an obsolete reason—a gentleman’s reason, you’d call it. … That’s all it was, so help me—a silly gesture of honor—and a stunt!” Jimmy then asks if his wife, Margaret, truly wants a divorce. “Of course,” Ned replies acidly. “She’s rich. She’ll be married again within a year. [It would be three years before Jenkins remarried.] Her pinhead won’t even retain a memory of what happened to her two years ago.” And along with the “silly gesture” of marrying her for “honor”—because she was pregnant—he sourly admits that he’d gotten hitched merely “because a perverse devil whispered in my ear that marriage was one of those few things I hadn’t done.” Ned’s then told that Margaret went “out of her mind with grief,” presuming he attempted suicide because she’s suing him for divorce. “Aha!” Ned says, even after his “rebirth.” “So that’s what she thinks! The devil!”124 Ned’s abusive portrayal of Margaret throughout the play, and thus O’Neill’s of Jenkins, must have played a key role—the key role, perhaps—in O’Neill’s resolution to destroy the play. In the distant future, he would discreetly, if also self-servingly, omit Jenkins and his son from Long Day’s Journey Into Night.¹²⁵

Return to Monte Cristo

On January 20, 1912, O’Neill was served his divorce summons from Jenkins’s attorney. Then he hopped a train for the Deep South. At the station in New Orleans, he stumbled onto the platform, in his words, “broke on the tail end of a bust which terminated in that city.”¹²⁶ O’Neill claimed he’d won some money at faro cards, went on a bender with a few pals from Jimmy the Priest’s, blacked out, and awoke, startled, to find himself on a train heading south. Actors in his father’s company remember a different story: James had wired money to Eugene in New York, they felt sure, in response to a telegram that read, “To eat or not to eat, that is the question.”¹²⁷ Whatever the case, O’Neill’s first stop in New Orleans was the city docks to drum up a berth back to New York. He had the papers on him to prove he was a qualified able-bodied seaman, but no ship sailing for New York had an opening. Only then did he contact his family.¹²⁸

James, Ella, and Jim were in New Orleans on a tour that had started the previous fall. Tormented by the prospect of financial insolvency in his elder years, James held his nose and cobbled together a tabloid version of Monte Cristo with a stage time of forty-one minutes (whittled down from its usual three hours). The touring company’s bill included, among others, a perky ragtime songster named Rae Samuels, a.k.a. “the Blue Streak of Ragtime,” a trampoline stunt team, and “the Juggling Burkes,” a two-man act that juggled “Indian clubs.” But James O’Neill as the Count of Monte Cristo was, of course, the main attraction. Jim was billed as “one of the foremost of the younger generation of leading men,” a short-lived reputation based chiefly on his ephemeral 1909 success in The Travelling Salesman. Eugene later described Jim’s choice of acting for a living as a “line of least resistance.” Jim had performed onstage throughout the previous decade, including several tours with his father, and in this vaudeville tour of Monte Cristo, he played a number of roles, one of which, in an inescapable irony, was that of Edmund Dantès’s financial benefactor Abbé Faria.129

The tour had arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, when James was first informed of Eugene’s attempt on his life. At that time, it was “whispered around” among the actors that the elder O’Neill’s son had “suffered some kind of misfortune.” James refused Eugene the money for a return ticket from New Orleans but offered him a job for $25 a week. “It was a case of act or walk home,” O’Neill remembered, “so I acted for the rest of the tour over the Orpheum Circuit.” O’Neill was cast as a jailer and a gendarme; while playing the gendarme, he wore a mustache wired to his nostrils to distinguish one character from the other. “That cut-down version was wonderful,” O’Neill joked to a reporter years later. “Characters came on that didn’t seem to belong there and did things that made no sense and said things that sounded insane. The Old Man had been playing Cristo so long he’d almost forgotten it, so he ad-libbed and improvised and never gave anybody a cue. You knew when your turn came when he stopped talking.”¹³⁰

“The tabloid presentation of ‘Monte Cristo,’” a Salt Lake City drama critic neatly summed up its reception, “is rather pitiful, all things considered, when one remembers past performances.” (Rae Samuels stole each evening with hoots of laughter and applause. In October 1920, Agnes Boulton would see Samuels perform the musical comedy The Tooting Tooties in order to glimpse, as she wrote O’Neill, “the eyes that smiled on your mad youth!”)¹³¹

From New Orleans, the company rode the Overland Limited rail line up to Ogden, Utah, and points north and west—Salt Lake City, Denver, and St. Paul, Minnesota (not coincidentally, the state to which Ned Malloy will head at the end of Exorcism).132 The O’Neills kept relations with the company cordial but aloof, sequestering themselves between towns in their own train car. When they arrived at a destination, Jim would drink heartily with the other actors but assume a haughty reserve if they got too chummy. An actor in the production, Charlie Webster, remembered Jim’s intoxicated face as “an alcoholic mask, reddish, glazed expression, or rather no expression.” And Jim wasn’t holding up his end onstage. “Imagine an actor who can’t fence!” James groused during rehearsals. On their afternoons off, he tried to coach his son in swordsmanship but finally gave up, simplifying the finale so that Jim merely had to strike James’s raised weapon once.¹³³

One grainy image of this production still exists. Taken at the Orpheum Theatre in Ogden, the photograph (too obscured by age to reproduce here) appeared in the Salt Lake City Evening Tribune. It was taken Friday night, February 2, the first time Eugene O’Neill had ever acted on the professional stage.¹³⁴ The photo shows James glaring down at the corrupt police chief Villefort—who, with the same aquiline nose and jutting chin, must be Jim—dead on the floor of the inn Pont du Gard. Eugene can just be made out upstage right, with his fake pointy mustache, hiding behind more expressive gendarmes. (Eleven people were advertised as having roles in the production, and ten are onstage; the missing cast member is whoever was playing the scoundrel Danglars.) Webster’s sketchy description matches James in the photo to a fault: “He was very graceful, used his hands eloquently. As Monte Cristo, wore black satin knee breeches, a white wig. His body had thickened but was still graceful. … Production had good costumes, came from his regular production.”¹³⁵

Despite the vaudeville circuit’s lowbrow reputation, its standards of behavior were notoriously strict. You couldn’t swear in public (signs forbade you even to say “damn”), and drunkenness and unruly behavior were forbidden. Jim respected this and played it relatively safe while still trying his father’s patience with crude practical jokes. Charlie Webster, playing Edmund Dantès’s son Albert, had a line challenging a villain to a duel, pronouncing it his “duty to repress calumny.” One night before the show, Jim cautioned Webster not to slip up and say “calomel” (a laxative). Sure enough, he uttered “calomel” instead of “calumny,” and James, playing opposite Webster, grunted, “Hmph,” as he generally did after such gaffes, but the audience didn’t appear to notice. On another night after the performance, Jim exited the theater out the stage door and into the alleyway singing at the top of his lungs, his baritone voice echoing off the building walls; but he was cut short when a bucket of water was dropped on his head.136

Webster described the elder James’s magnetism among the troupe in nothing but admiring terms: he was like “a priest, quiet; he never raised his voice; he had a spiritual quality.” Frustrated as James was with his boys, he occasionally revealed a deep paternal affection for them. Once, when a group of reporters was interviewing James and the other players, Eugene walked in the front entrance and hopped up onstage to join them. “He’s a handsome chap,” one reporter said. “Takes after his father.” James waved off the compliment. “I was never as good looking as he is.” He expressed less parental satisfaction in private, once taking Eugene aside and reproaching him with cool reserve. “I am not satisfied with your performance, sir,” he said. “I am not satisfied with your play, sir,” Eugene retorted.¹³⁷

William Lee, an electrician at the Olympic Theatre in St. Louis, where the company played in late February, remembered Eugene as a conspicuously dreadful addition to what he considered an otherwise “grand” production. “I can’t understand,” scoffed Pat Short, a stagehand at the Olympic, “how a fine actor and a smart man like James O’Neill can have a son so dumb.” Lee remembered overhearing James and Eugene in a testy backstage exchange: “You never could act,” James fumed. “You can’t act. And you never will.” “What of it?” his son shrugged.¹³⁸

Eugene rarely greeted the doorman with so much as a hello when he arrived at the theater, nor did he chat with the other actors while waiting for his cue. “He never had a word to say to anybody,” Lee recalled.¹³⁹ He also suffered terribly from stage fright (an affliction he would never overcome), and like so many of O’Neill’s future companions and theatrical associates, Webster found his anxiety infectious. Once during the Château d’If scene, for instance, just before the set change for James’s climactic proclamation that the world is his, a trembling O’Neill, playing a jailer, looked down at the body of Abbé Faria and spluttered out a line he’d rehearsed at least a dozen times: “What has happened here?” Webster, affected by O’Neill’s halting delivery, responded with a clipped, “Yes, he is dead.”140 The audience howled with laughter. O’Neill and Webster heard James from the wings thundering, “What happened? What did they do? Why are they laughing? … Where are they? I’ll kill those boys.” They made a hasty exit and clambered up into the fly lofts.¹⁴¹ Even so, James rarely raised his renowned cello-toned voice in anger, even when enraged by his children’s drunken behavior; instead, he’d slip into an Irish brogue.¹⁴²

“I had a small part,” O’Neill remarked in hindsight, “but I couldn’t have been worse if I’d been playing Hamlet.” He later boasted that throughout the tour neither he nor Jim had drawn “a sober breath.” Full-blown alcoholics by this time, the two made a habit of downing several whiskeys before each performance. “The least said about those acting days the better,” O’Neill said. “The alcoholic content was as high as the acting was low. They graduated me from the Orpheum Circuit with degree of Lousy Cum Laude. If the tour lasted a month longer I would also have won my D.T. [delirium tremens]. The one remorseful thought … is that I didn’t warn audiences in advance about my performance so they could all get drunk, too. It must have been a terrible thing to witness sober.” Nonetheless, O’Neill recalled his brief time on the circuit fondly: “My brother and I had one grand time of it,” he said, “and I look back on it as one of the merriest periods of my life.”¹⁴³ But the experience as a whole spoiled his enjoyment of attending the theater, as he couldn’t keep his mind off the actors: “I can’t help seeing with the relentless eye of heredity, upbringing, and personal experience, every little trick they pull.”¹⁴⁴

James O’Neill, in fairness, had reason to grumble over these few months on tour with his family: Eugene had just attempted suicide; Jim was weak willed, a lush, and failing as an actor, the one profession that might have allowed him to survive on his own steam; and James’s reputation as a has-been among the press corps had expanded to intolerable levels. Even his hometown paper had admitted a few years earlier that, proud as everyone was that James was a Cincinnati boy, “‘Monte Cristo,’ one might say, ruined James O’Neill … his success was such that he has never been able to entirely break away from the part or persuade the public to abate its demands for its continuance.” Adding financial insult to domestic and professional injury, James also lost nearly $40,000 when two firms he’d invested in went belly-up.145

Then there was Ella O’Neill—lost to “the poison” again. Ella was rarely glimpsed by the rest of the company, except when she slipped in and out of her husband’s dressing room. Webster’s impression, though he observed her only from a distance, closely resembles that of Ella’s counterpart in Long Day’s Journey Into Night: “Someone remote. … Frail, unsteady … very sensitive, quiet, someone who had been well born, floating, wore clothes very feminine. … On train always hidden, like a wraith.” The O’Neill men treated her with the utmost care and deference, like some kind of purified essence that might be “contaminated,” he said, by a stranger’s touch. Ella had also begun behaving erratically after Eugene joined the tour. In one disquieting incident, she edged her way toward the stage while James roared his line, “Revenge is mine, Fernand—I hold thy heart in my hand!” Glancing over and seeing her approach from the wings, he nearly signaled for the curtain when a stagehand stopped her before she could reveal herself to the audience. Ella attempted this several more times, prompting James to check the wings each time he performed the scene.¹⁴⁶ No one but the three O’Neill men could have known that Ella was on morphine, that her otherworldly demeanor was a result of the drug’s effect rather than her ordinary temperament.

Long Day’s Journey, the play that allowed O’Neill to come to terms with his mother’s drug addiction, is set that following summer. But O’Neill only hints that it might have been his suicide attempt and presence on the tour afterward that instigated Ella’s relapse, rather than the more blameless diagnosis of tuberculosis that the work implies.

The O’Neills returned to New York by early March 1912, and though Eugene’s subsequent movements remain a mystery, there was one place he undeniably wasn’t: his divorce proceedings. Not legally obliged to attend the June 10 trial in White Plains, O’Neill was spared the depositions about his night with the prostitute as well as exchanges between the presiding judge, Joseph Morschauser, and Kathleen like this one: “Have you voluntarily cohabitated with [the defendant] since he committed these adulteries?” the judge asked. “No.” “Have you forgiven him?” “No.”147 Kathleen was granted “exclusive care, custody and control” of Eugene Jr., and O’Neill was absolved, presumably to ensure an unmitigated dissociation from her and Eugene, of child support and alimony. The interlocutory judgment was filed July 8 and, since O’Neill made no attempt to challenge it, the final judgment on default was handed down on October 11. It’s unknown whether O’Neill ever read this second document, but the judge who wrote it, Isaac N. Mills, made it clear that he believed O’Neill unfit for marriage: “It shall not be lawful,” he ruled, “for the defendant to marry any person other than the plaintiff in the lifetime of the plaintiff.”¹⁴⁸

Back in New London that summer, O’Neill spent long, lazy days drifting nude in a rowboat on the Thames River and enjoying frequent swims off the Scott family dock across the road. He also swam a mile across the Thames, and the Day newspaper reported that he made “good time.” At night he visited the Bradley Street brothels and drank with his friends Art McGinley, Ed Keefe, Hutch Collins, and “Ice” Casey. “Gene O’Neill and I tried to drink America dry,” McGinley liked to say, “and nearly succeeded.” Many evenings they played cards and read poetry at Dr. Joseph “Doc” Ganey’s “Second Story Club,” where a cohort of like-minded intellectuals congregated at the physician’s apartment on Main Street (now Eugene O’Neill Drive).¹⁴⁹

When his father’s harangues about working for a living could no longer be ignored, O’Neill took a job for $10 a week at the New London Telegraph, a liberal-minded newspaper then struggling to stay afloat. Upon receiving one of O’Neill’s first filings from the police court, city editor Malcolm “Mal” Mollan called him into his office. “The smell of the rooms is made convincing,” Mollan began, with barely concealed sarcasm, “The amount of blood on the floor is precisely measured; you have drawn a nice picture of the squalor and stupidity and degradation of that household.” Then the editor lowered the boom: “But would you mind finding out the name of the gentleman who carved the lady and whether the dame is his wife or daughter or who? And phone the hospital for a hint as to whether she is dead or discharged or what? Then put the facts into a hundred and fifty words—and send this literary batik to the picture framers.” On another assignment, the Harvard/Yale rowing regatta, O’Neill’s prose dripped with pretentious alliteration—“bronze and brawny backs bent against the oars” and so on. The editors, having read a few sentences into the piece, demanded to know at what point the reporter might deign to inform his readers which crew team had won the race. O’Neill regularly showed up drunk at the news desk, and after he’d done so once too often, Mollan warned him he’d be dismissed; but the business manager, Charles Thompson, took the editor aside. “Hell,” he said. “You can’t do that. His father is paying his salary.”150

The Telegraph’s editor in chief, Frederick P. Latimer, a former judge and friend of James’s, allowed O’Neill some latitude by publishing his poetry in the newspaper’s “Laconics” column, even though Latimer believed that given O’Neill’s stylistic flourishes in his prose reporting, he would “eventually abandon the poetic medium and become a novelist.” (As late as the mid-1920s, Latimer maintained his belief that O’Neill should have been a novelist, and so did O’Neill.)¹⁵¹

O’Neill’s talents proved better suited to writing poetry than reporting, in fact, but not by much. He wrote sophomoric, propagandizing verse consisting mainly of barbs at Standard Oil and other business interests and backhanded brickbats at politicians such as presidential rivals Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft:

Our Teddy opens wide his mouth,

  N’runs around n’yells all day,

N’calls some people naughty names,

  N’says things that he shouldn’t say.

N’when he’s nothing else to do

  He swells up like he’d like to bust,

N’pounds on something with his fist

  N’tells us ’bout some wicked trust.

I always wondered why that was—

    I guess it’s ’cause

    Taft never does.152

Most of O’Neill’s poems at the Telegraph consisted of stylistic send-ups of popular rhymesters like Kipling, Robert Burns, and Robert W. Service with topics alluding to local events, political figures, and wealthy citizens. O’Neill’s verse, Latimer wrote, would “make us choke with wrath at the queer wildness of his ideas, so different from those of other folks and hard to comprehend.” Frustrating as their debates were while rowing together on the Thames or smoking in a back room at the paper, the editor nonetheless retained a “dim, small notion” that this upstart had a touch of the poet in him. O’Neill’s estimation of these propagandistic verses once he’d matured as a writer is plain enough: by 1923, he admitted that although they marked the true start of his writing career, the work was “junk of a low order.” “I was trying to write popular humorous journalistic verse for a small town paper,” he said in 1929, “and the stuff should be judged—nearly all of it—by that intent.” Later still, in 1936, he scolded a publisher interested in reprinting this early poetry as a collection: “Frankly … I’m all against it. It would be a shame to waste good type on such nonsense. If those small-town jingles of my well-misspent youth were amusingly bad, I would have no objection, for their republication might hand someone a laugh, at least. But they’re not. They are merely very dull stuff indeed—and so my decision must be to let them lie suitably defunct.” Even so, O’Neill’s consistent refrain in the offices of the Telegraph must have sounded laughably conceited at the time—that one day James O’Neill would be remembered chiefly for being Eugene O’Neill’s father.¹⁵³

After a few months at the Telegraph, however, O’Neill had convinced himself that the humble pursuit of small-town journalism was to be his true calling. If nothing else, it might provide the requisite financial stability to marry his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Maibelle Scott. Scott lived with her sister Arlene and her husband, who had moved into a property of his father’s known as the Pink House, where the O’Neills lived before moving into Monte Cristo Cottage two doors down. Maibelle and Arlene were the daughters of John Scott, a grocer who lived a block away, and Eugene had known the family for years. But to reintroduce himself in a more romantic light, he arranged to cover a wedding Scott was attending for the Telegraph. Pretentiously donning one of his father’s black capes, he bowed before her and spluttered with inept gallantry, “At last we meet!” Later that night, at eleven o’clock, the tranquility of the Scott household was disturbed by the jangling of the telephone. It was Eugene O’Neill. Could he speak to Scott to ask her out for a date?154 Maibelle would later be the model for the fifteen-year-old Muriel McComber in his 1933 comedy Ah, Wilderness! (though the play takes place in 1906, not 1912). Richard Miller, O’Neill’s loosely based fictional counterpart, sends Muriel love letters and racy poetry, just as his creator did Scott. O’Neill gave her the original manuscript of his poem “Free” and wrote her over two hundred love letters, a unique store of material from this period in his life that calamitously, for posterity, Scott burned after she’d become engaged to another man a few years later.¹⁵⁵

O’Neill and Scott met each other secretively on and off for the rest of the fall, as neither of their mothers was pleased to hear of the liaison. One night, after O’Neill saw her home after a showing of The Bohemian Girl at the Lyceum Theatre, Scott’s mother informed her that she would “shoot him” if he ever showed his face there again. For her part, Ella warned another local girl on the phone, wrongly assuming it was Scott, “You’d better stay away from him. He isn’t a good influence for you or any other girl.” Mary Tyrone, Ella’s fictional double, similarly chides her son, “No respectable parents will let their daughters be seen with you” (CP3, 739). But Ella’s disapproval of Eugene’s behavior was equaled by her disapproval of Scott as a match for him—she had little enthusiasm for her handsome young son’s marrying a grocer’s daughter.¹⁵⁶

Maibelle Scott was perplexed by Eugene’s reputation in town as an unseemly roustabout. “He was always a gentleman around me, never drunk or anything like that,” she recalled, “and I couldn’t understand why people talked against him, including his own parents. I felt that he was very much misunderstood.” She was nevertheless surprised to see him ill at ease at parties and other public gatherings, exhibiting an all-too-commonly reported “sad streak in him, a what’s-the-use sort of attitude.” She later acknowledged that this depressive attitude prevented her from truly falling in love with O’Neill. “When I met my husband, I realized the feeling was different. I knew then that I had never loved Eugene but had only been fascinated.”157

As well as conducting Romeo and Juliet–style romances, O’Neill and Richard Miller from Ah, Wilderness! also shared left-wing views considered unsuitable for consumption by respectable young women. Like his creator, Richard disdains the Fourth of July as a “stupid farce”: “I’ll celebrate the day the people bring out the guillotine again and I see Pierpont Morgan being driven by in a tumbrel!” “Son,” responds his tolerant father, Nat Miller, a character recognizable to New Londoners as O’Neill’s editor Frederick Latimer, “if I didn’t know it was you talking, I’d think we had Emma Goldman with us” (CP3, 13).

Notwithstanding his father’s relative wealth and celebrity, O’Neill experienced anti-Irish bigotry firsthand in New London, and his Irish characters would lay bare their creator’s emotional and political affiliation with “shanty” or “bogtrotter” Irish against the capitalist classes, Puritan morality, and the hypocrisy of the socially ambitious “lace-curtain” Irish. “The one thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish,” O’Neill would later say. “And, strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked.”¹⁵⁸ The ethnic tensions in New London and across New England between defiant Irish Catholics and establishment Yankee Protestants left O’Neill with a profound sympathy for America’s disenfranchised populations writ large. When he voted in the presidential election, he cast his very first ballot for the socialist Eugene V. Debs, who’d run his campaign from a jail cell, despite O’Neill’s belief that American party politics was “the acme of futility.” “I voted for Debs,” he glibly remarked, “because I dislike John D. Rockefeller’s bald head.”159

O’Neill openly and enduringly despised the Yankee families who represented the New London elite. The Chappell family, for instance, would later appear as the offstage Chatfields in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and he portrays Mary Tyrone as harboring a deep-seated jealousy of this clan whose lives appear somehow more meaningful than those of her own Irish Catholic family. In one scene, Mary peers out a window and notices her older son Jamie ducking behind a hedge he’s trimming as the Chatfields drive by. Jamie is embarrassed to be seen engaged in menial work, while casually dressed James Tyrone bows with dignity to the passing car. The episode sparks a revealing conversation between Edmund and Mary about the town: Edmund likes it “well enough. I suppose because it’s the only home we’ve had.” “Jamie’s a fool to care about the Chatfields,” he scoffs. “For Pete’s sake, who ever heard of them outside this hick burg?” Mary agrees: “Big frogs in a small puddle.” “Still, the Chatfields and people like them stand for something,” she says. “Not that I want anything to do with them. I’ve always hated this town and everyone in it” (CP3, 738).

More widely known targets of O’Neill’s Irish begrudgery were Edward C. Hammond, a wealthy member of the local gentry, and Edward S. Harkness, whose father had been a partner in John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire. These men were more crocodiles than big frogs in that small puddle. O’Neill lampooned Harkness later as the stuffy millionaire T. Stedman Harder in A Moon for the Misbegotten: “Not unpleasant … he is simply immature, naturally lethargic, a bit stupid … deliberate in his speech, slow on the uptake, and has no sense of humor” (CP3, 884) and offstage as Harker in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But O’Neill’s characterization was perhaps more accurate of Hammond than of Harkness. The latter, over the course of a generously philanthropic life and later through bequests, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various universities and museums, including $1 million to establish Yale University’s celebrated Theatre Department. (In an ironic twist, it was through that department’s influence that Yale chose O’Neill for an honorary doctorate in 1926. Edward C. Hammond’s former estate also became the current location of another renowned theatrical organization—the Tony Award–winning Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.) O’Neill nevertheless immortalized Harkness, from the playwright’s earliest years as a scribbling reporter to the last play he ever completed, A Moon for the Misbegotten, as the archetype of the well-heeled but vapid Protestant oppressor.160

The Harkness and Hammond properties were adjacent to one another, just west of New London on Long Island Sound. Between these two massive estates lay a strip of land owned by James O’Neill and rented by an Irish-born tenant named John Dolan. Dolan made a lasting impression on Eugene in 1912, and he would straggle on as a tenant of the O’Neill family’s into the 1920s. Nicknamed “Dirty” in reference to the permanent state of his feet, Dolan would appear as the offstage Shaughnessy in Long Day’s Journey, then as Phil Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten. In fact, O’Neill first conceived of A Moon for the Misbegotten as his “Dolan play” before his brother Jim took it over. O’Neill describes Dolan as fifty-five years old, short in stature, thick-necked and muscular, with a voice that was “high-pitched with a pronounced brogue” (CP3, 862). Phil Hogan’s quick-witted sense of humor—grounded in laughing off life’s difficulties, rapid tone reversals, and word play—is all Irish. His other traits associated with Irishness, however (pugilistic, drunken, conspiratorial), badly offended “lace-curtain” Irish audience members when A Moon for the Misbegotten was first produced in 1947.

Edmund Tyrone shares a story with his family in the opening scene of Long Day’s Journey that their tenant Shaughnessy (Dolan) had told him the previous night at a local inn. Offering a comic parable of the tensions between the Irish and the Yankees, Shaughnessy delights Edmund with his triumph over the Standard Oil magnate: Harker had accused Shaughnessy of tearing down the fence that separates their land in order for the farmer’s pigs to bathe in his ice pond. The Irishman retorted that it was Harker who was tampering with his fence, thus nefariously exposing his unsuspecting pigs to pneumonia and cholera. “He was King of Ireland, if he had his rights,” Edmund laughs, “and scum was scum to him no matter how much money it had stolen from the poor.” Shaughnessy then ordered the millionaire off his land and threatened legal action for Harker’s vandalism. James chuckles at the joke on the recognized sachem of the Protestant gentry, then abruptly resumes the role of an outraged landlord—“The dirty blackguard!” Fearful of trouble arising from the harassment of one of the town’s leading citizens, James attacks Edmund for his “damned Socialist anarchist sentiments” against Standard Oil; but the whole family knows that deep down, as Edmund says, James is “tickled to death over the great Irish victory” (CP3, 726).161

The (Love) Sick Apprentice

At first O’Neill felt as if he just had a nasty cold that October of 1912, a wretchedness he’d foolishly exacerbated by bicycling to his job at the Telegraph in a rainstorm. Then the family physician, Dr. Harold Heyer, concluded that he had pleurisy, but by November, he’d upgraded his diagnosis: tuberculosis.¹⁶² The lung disease, commonly referred to as “the Great White Plague,” was perceived at the time as more of a moral than a physical affliction, because it appeared to originate in the congested urban slums. (O’Neill blamed his contracting the disease on Jimmy the Priest’s, where he’d shared quarters with “the Lunger.”) Ella also relapsed that fall back into her own morally charged affliction, having poisoned her system with so much morphine that she too required medical attention. This confluence enabled Mabel Reynolds, a young nurse in training whom Dr. Heyer first assigned to the family, a rare window into life at Monte Cristo Cottage.

When Reynolds arrived at the door, she heard male voices shouting back and forth inside. She was already frightened of Jim, whom New Londoners spoke of as “a problem, always in some kind of scrape.” Someone eventually heard her knocking and ordered her in. The three O’Neill men were hunched over a round table in the living room with a whiskey bottle and glasses. No one got up to greet her;they simply waved her upstairs. What she found there horrified her. “[Ella O’Neill] was in bed and looked terrible,” Reynolds remembered. “She looked—this is a horrible expression but it will give you the idea—she looked like a witch, with her white hair and large dark eyes. She was rocking back and forth, wringing her hands. ‘My son, my son,’ she kept repeating, and tears were running down her face.”163

The dreadful commotion of the O’Neill men shouting downstairs never let up, and Reynolds must have heard Ella sob, “My son, my son,” a hundred times, though it wasn’t clear whether she meant Eugene or her dead child Edmund. It especially shocked her that Ella, such a proper lady in public, could behave this way. It took hours to calm her, during which time Reynolds gave her an alcohol rub, exposing the track marks on her arm. None of the men came upstairs, and they were gone the next morning when Reynolds left for home. Her impression was that “they were terribly upset that [Ella] had gone back to the addiction.” “No,” Reynolds told her interviewer, “I never went back.”¹⁶⁴

Dr. Heyer then dispatched Olive Evans, whose experiences were less nightmarish than Reynolds’s. She did hear Ella crying as she rocked in her chair. “It was a whimpering sound, like a kitten. I once said to Eugene, ‘Shouldn’t I go downstairs and see about your mother?’ He told me not to; he was very insistent about it, and said I was never to go unless invited. I never was.” Ella later dressed Evans down for delivering messages between Eugene and Maibelle Scott: “I know what’s been happening. There are many reasons why we don’t want this affair to go on, and religion is the principal reason.” Evans further recollected that O’Neill wanted nothing to do with his father James, referring to him acidly as “the Irish peasant.” “Oh, please, Geney, don’t call Papa that,” Ella would plead hopelessly. Once, when James poked his head into his son’s room to ask how he was feeling, O’Neill hardly looked up from bed.¹⁶⁵

On December 9, 1912, O’Neill endured a painful aspiration procedure to relieve the fluid in his thoracic cavity.¹⁶⁶ He was then accompanied by Olive Evans to New Haven, where they were met by James, who’d been in New York overseeing legal issues regarding a film version of Monte Cristo. (James’s film was released the following year, but not before a rival company had dampened moviegoers’ interest by releasing its own adaptation.)¹⁶⁷ For the paltry sum of $4 a week, James checked his son into the Fairfield County Home for the Care and Treatment of Persons Suffering from Tuberculosis in Shelton, Connecticut, a state-run sanatorium that, in contrast to its grandiose title, consisted of a farmhouse and two shacks that served as makeshift infirmaries. (This is the scorned institution reffered to in Long Day’s Journey Into Night).

Monte Cristo Cottage at 325 Pequot Avenue in New London. The small addition at the left is where the complete action of Long Day’s Journey Into Night takes place.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

James O’Neill, like most Irishmen before the discovery of antibiotics, regarded tuberculosis as nothing short of a death sentence. “If Edmund was a lousy acre of land you wanted, the sky would be the limit!” Jamie Tyrone pillories his father in Long Day’s Journey: “What I’m afraid of is, with your Irish bog-trotter idea that consumption is fatal, you’ll figure it would be a waste of money to spend any more than you can help.” “I have every hope Edmund will be cured,” James retorts. “And keep your dirty tongue off Ireland! You’re a fine one to sneer, with the map of it on your face!” (CP3, 730, 761).

Eugene checked himself out of the Fairfield County Home after only two days and took a train straight to New York to confront his father about paying for a better facility. James then consulted with several New York specialists, one of whom, Dr. James Alexander Miller, encouraged him to send Eugene to Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, Connecticut. Gaylord Farm was a well-funded treatment center, one that at the time, though it cost only $7 a week, had an exemplary reputation (as it still does to this day).

O’Neill was admitted on the first day he was notified that there was a vacancy: Christmas Eve, 1912. Explaining later that the medical staff considered him “an uninteresting case, there was so little the matter,” O’Neill insisted that the only element of heroism to be found in his tale of woe was that he’d checked in on Christmas Eve—“at least, some folks thought it so, not knowing that to an actor’s son, whose father had been on tour nearly every winter, Christmas meant less than nothing.” In fact, O’Neill had never experienced the disenchantment many children feel after discovering that their beloved Kris Kringle is just a holiday myth; he’d never had reason to believe in Santa Claus from the start.168

Gaylord Farm, it turned out, offered a profound respite from the chaos of the last several years within its nurturing walls. O’Neill hit it off with several patients and nurses there, but he also discovered a replacement father figure in his attending physician, the sanatorium’s superintendent, Dr. David Russell Lyman. O’Neill affectionately describes his character based on Dr. Lyman, Doctor Stanton in The Straw (1919), as speaking with a slight southern accent; he is “a handsome man of forty-five or so with a grave, care-lined, studious face lightened by a kindly, humorous smile. His gray eyes, saddened by the suffering they have witnessed, have the sympathetic quality of real understanding” (CP1, 747). O’Neill and Lyman corresponded for years after his case was deemed arrested, and their letters reveal the kind of mutual respect and intimacy one might associate with a devoted father and adoring son rather than a physician and his patient. More than a year after his release, O’Neill wrote Dr. Lyman, “If, as they say, it is sweet to visit the place one was born in, then it will be doubly sweet for me to visit the place I was reborn in—for my second birth was the only one which had my full approval.”169

Thanks to the warm-hearted atmosphere cultivated by Lyman and the head nurse of his infirmary, Mary Clark, O’Neill indeed experienced a transformative intellectual and psychological “second birth” at Gaylord Farm. Ten years later, though, he gently corrected a reporter who referenced the growing legend that O’Neill had decided to become a writer while convalescing there. No, he said, he’d discovered his vocation while writing for the Telegraph. However, he added, “It was at Gaylord that my mind got a chance to establish itself, to digest and valuate the impressions of many past years in which one experience had crowded on another with never a second’s reflection. At Gaylord I really thought about my life for the first time, about past and future. Undoubtedly the inactivity forced upon me by the life at a san forced me to mental activity, especially as I had always been high-strung and nervous temperamentally.”¹⁷⁰

O’Neill’s convalescence had less to do with physical health, given that he only had a mild case of tuberculosis, and more to do with mental and artistic health, as if Gaylord Farm had been a writers’ retreat like Yaddo in upstate New York or the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. It was there that O’Neill chose to pursue drama, acknowledging to himself that his experiences touring with his father would prove invaluable for the genre. O’Neill began reading many of the playwrights who were to become his greatest influences—Irish writers like Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Shaw as well as Ibsen, the Elizabethans, and the Greeks and, perhaps most important, the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. He read the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, an epic poem that an Irish Catholic nurse presented to him in the hopes that it might revive the young apostate’s faith.¹⁷¹ Attracted by the poem’s portrayal of the modernist presentiment of continual flight—from society, from God, from the self—he learned it by heart and later recited it when well soused and deep in reflective thought to friends and lovers in Greenwich Village.

O’Neill’s 1919 play The Straw, based on the friendships he’d made among Gaylord’s patients and staff, also portrays a fleeting romance with a fellow Irish American patient, Catherine “Kitty” MacKay. Like the play’s female lead, Eileen Carmody, MacKay was from a large Irish family (her parents had raised ten children) in Waterbury, Connecticut; her father was as heartless, miserly, and self-pitying as Eileen’s father, Bill Carmody; and Eileen falls in love with the darkly handsome patient Stephen Murray, who like his creator boasts of his literary aspirations and prides himself on his deeply cynical view of life. O’Neill’s portrayal of Eileen in his stage directions faithfully describes the actual MacKay: “Her wavy mass of dark hair is parted in the middle and combed low on her forehead, covering her ears, to a knot at the back of her head. The oval of her face is spoiled by a long, rather heavy, Irish jaw contrasting with the delicacy of her other features,” and her shape is “slight and undeveloped” (CP1, 729). Upon his departure from Gaylord, O’Neill kissed MacKay, promising that one day she would see herself onstage in one of his plays.172 She never would. MacKay died of the disease in 1915, and The Straw wouldn’t premiere for another six years.

O’Neill and MacKay’s relationship ignited an acute preoccupation in the budding dramatist about the devastating results of uneducated working-class women pairing up with educated men from wealthy families. In each case, what the women want—stability, the romantic ideal of the artist—and what they get—volatility, alcoholism, and unwanted exposure to existentialist angst—are devastatingly at odds. O’Neill presents working-class women in his plays as less morally compromised than their male counterparts, as in this sonnet he wrote for MacKay after his return to New London:

Smile on my passionate plea abrupt,

  On bended (so to speak) knee I sue

Doubtless my morals are most corrupt,

  There is an elegant chance for you.

Why not reform my life? Thru and thru,

  Scour and cleanse my soul of the mire,

(A regular Christian thing to do)

  Oh come to my Land of Heart’s Desire.

Further on in the love poem, O’Neill refers to tuberculosis as “punishment full and dire. … Penance for sins we’ve paid in advance.”173 He later equated battling the disease with the challenge of life as a whole. “And the harder the patient’s fight has been,” he said, “the more this applies, I should think. After having conquered T.B. by a long grind of a struggle, one’s confidence in coming out on top in other battles ought to be increased ten-fold.”¹⁷⁴

Each of O’Neill’s so-called physical and social inadequacies up to that point, the ones that his parents reminded him of—his shyness, his constitutional depression, his stammering speech, his alcoholism, his reputation as a dissolute Irishman among the New London establishment (thus giving beloved Ireland a bad name), his accusations of abandonment by his family, his suicidal tendencies, his loss of Catholic faith—all combined in O’Neill’s imagination in the form of tuberculosis. Determined to make good, his natural impulse would be to overcompensate. “Someday I won’t be known as his son. He will be known as my father,” he boasted at the Telegraph.¹⁷⁵ Then it was only bluster, perhaps; but now he’d gained the confidence to make good on the pledge.

The American writer William Saroyan wrote in 1939, at a time when American heroes were sorely needed, that “only the weak and unsure perform the heroic. They’ve got to.”¹⁷⁶ A year later, Dr. Louis E. Bisch, one of O’Neill’s psychoanalysts, likened his patient’s widely perceived “human defects” to Conrad’s belated arrival to the English language at age twenty, Beethoven’s deafness, and Paderewski’s frail fingers, among so many other remarkable instances in which overcompensation breeds inspiration: “Shyness, inferiority feelings and self-consciousness, as well as physical handicaps, have served as spring-boards which catapulted individuals to success far greater—in many cases—than they might have achieved otherwise.” “It is the overcompensation that does it,” Bisch said. “Eugene O’Neill did not set out to become a dramatist. The son of actors, he was inclined to resist all things connected with the stage.” But then came his tuberculosis, a disease closely associated in American society with his other “defects,” and “thus was he started on the road to winning the Nobel Prize.”177 O’Neill’s literary idol Friedrich Nietzsche more broadly established this proposition when he wrote, “Out of thy poisons brewedst thou balsam for thyself. … Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. … Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.”¹⁷⁸

O’Neill had been born to a race of overcompensators. At that very moment in history, the Irish Players of the Abbey Theatre, the vanguard of the Irish Renaissance, had ensured that what had been an abject fantasy in Ireland for eight hundred long years would grow into an undeniable reality in but one generation: retribution. This scheme for retribution, though most pronouncedly carried out by the singular talents of James Joyce, was not only long-sought independence from British rule but a literary counterattack fought with the very language they’d been mandated to speak as their fiercest weapon. The Irish would transform, utterly, the despised, compulsory tongue of their British colonizers into a new and terrible beauty. While at Gaylord, O’Neill, however unwittingly, was formulating a similar plot. He would also strike back against the language he deplored: that of the tawdry, hateful popular theater of his father, the overwhelmingly powerful institution that had denied him his family. But he required a motivational push, which Bisch would quite rightly identify. “It took T.B.,” O’Neill wrote after years of punishing insecurities, “to blast me loose” (CP1, 742).

Within a week of O’Neill’s release from Gaylord Farm on June 3, 1913, he learned of his friend James Byth’s untimely death. On June 5, Byth had plunged from his bedroom window on the third floor of Jimmy the Priest’s down to the paved courtyard below. He was discovered alive but unconscious, with both legs broken and a fractured skull; without regaining consciousness, Byth died in the hospital the following day. The New York Health Bureau listed the death as a suicide, and O’Neill resolutely believed it was.179 Byth, like Driscoll before him, would hold an abiding place in O’Neill’s imagination for the rest of his life: “Always my friend—at least always when he had several jolts of liquor—saw a turn in the road tomorrow. He was going to get himself together and get back to work. Well, he did get a job and got fired. Then he realized that this tomorrow never would come. He solved everything by jumping to his death from the bedroom at Jimmy’s.”¹⁸⁰ Subsequently, the British pressman became one of O’Neill’s most significant case studies in self-delusion. In the last scene of his story “Tomorrow,” Jimmy is haunted by his failures as a husband and as a war correspondent in Cape Town; from within “Tommy the Priest’s” bar, the O’Neill character, named Art, hears “a swish, a sickish thud as of a heavy rock dropping into thick mud.” A group of the men rush outside to find Jimmy’s body shattered on the flagstones in a black pool of blood. “The sky was pale with the light of dawn,” the story concludes. “Tomorrow had come” (CP3, 966–67).

O’Neill’s low standing among New Londoners as a drunken misanthrope only worsened over that summer, doubly so in his father’s eyes. James implored his New London friend Clayton “Ham” Hamilton, one of the best-known theater critics of the day, to have a serious talk with his wayward son about his future. Hamilton and O’Neill’s first meeting ended badly. Hamilton saw in O’Neill a young man suffering from “a habit of silence, and an evident disease of shyness.” He remembered O’Neill as a more interesting creature to look at, with his “very large and dreamy eyes,” than to listen to: “His speech was rather hesitant and he never said very much.” Having gathered no useful feedback from Hamilton, James stowed his son away for the winter months in New London at the Packard, a riverfront boardinghouse run by the Rippin family at 416 Pequot Avenue just down the street from Monte Cristo Cottage. Hamilton, who frequently boarded with the Rippins, recalled that the exasperated paterfamilias dropped Eugene off, ordered his son “to behave himself,” then skipped town.¹⁸¹

Back in New London late in that spring of 1914, Hamilton was astonished to discover that O’Neill had been writing at a breakneck pace over the winter months, having already composed five plays—A Wife for a Life, The Web, Thirst, Recklessness, and Warnings—a clutch of maladroit yet promising one-acts that O’Neill later referred to as the “first five Stations of the Cross in my Plod up Parnassus.”182 The last four, along with Fog, were published the following year in his first book, Thirst and Other One-Act Plays, for the American Dramatists Series of the Gorham Press of Boston (a volume financed with a $450 payment from his father). O’Neill was still exasperated by the mystifying process he’d devoted himself to and bluntly asked the seasoned critic, “How are plays written?” “Never mind how plays are written,” Hamilton snapped. “Write down what you know about the sea, and about the men who sail before the mast. This has been done in the novel; it has been done in the short story; it has not been done in the drama. Keep your eye on life,—on life as you have seen it; and to hell with the rest!”¹⁸³

Hamilton pointed out that writers of poetry and fiction like John Masefield, Jack London, and Joseph Conrad, each of whom O’Neill read avidly, had enjoyed enormous critical and popular success with their sea tales. But up to then no American playwright had adopted the sea as a subject. Eugene’s time on the Charles Racine, the Ikala, the New York, and the Philadelphia, combined with his theatrical know-how accumulated over the years touring with his father, made the aspiring playwright a superlative candidate to exploit such a national literary deficit.

O’Neill was way ahead of him: Thirst, Warnings, and Fog all take place either during or just after a shipwreck, and O’Neill’s readership, small as it was, couldn’t have helped recalling the horrific doom of the thousand-foot transatlantic liner Titanic in 1912. One of the many tragic ironies of the Titanic catastrophe was that the steamer Californian was within twenty miles of the foundering vessel before it sank; but the Californian didn’t hear the other ship’s call for help because no wireless operator had been on duty. After the sinking, in which 1,503 souls had drowned, legislation was passed requiring that large ships post a radio operator on duty at all times. Warnings, based in part on Joseph Conrad’s “The End of the Tether,” tells the story of a ship’s wireless operator who goes deaf, misses a warning signal, and commits suicide from guilt after his disability causes the destruction of the ship. Thirst takes place on a life raft with three survivors: a dancer, a businessman, and a West Indian mulatto sailor. The first two are racists and become convinced the mulatto is withholding water. The dancer dies of thirst, but not before devolving into insanity. When the sailor insists that they must cannibalize her to save their own lives, the businessman heaves her remains overboard. The sailor turns on him next, and in the struggle, they fall into the water and are devoured by sharks. Fog is set on a lifeboat adrift off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the Titanic hit the iceberg and where the playwright himself had kept watch while returning to New York on the Philadelphia.184

At the Packard that spring, O’Neill composed another sea play, the Children of the Sea, based on his time on the Ikala and later titled Bound East for Cardiff, and a one-act, The Movie Man, a satire about the Mexican Revolution. He also completed two full-length plays, Bread and Butter, which contrasts small-town life in New London with his time in the Manhattan art studio scene in 1909, and Servitude, a boorish domestic comedy about sacrifices, primarily made by women, for a successful marriage. That spring, he left the Packard for Monte Cristo Cottage after his father returned to New London and was, O’Neill explained to young Jessica Rippin, so “lonely [he] had to solace himself with the comforting presence of his younger mistake.”¹⁸⁵ While there, he published a political poem, “Fratricide,” on May 17 in the socialist paper the New York Call and penned another one-act, Abortion, about a superstar college man who impregnates a local girl while attending a school resembling Princeton (which can’t help but bring to mind his actual affair with the Trenton girl), pays for her abortion, then commits suicide after hearing that she’d died during the surgery. When James read these plays, he threw up his hands. “My God! Where did you get such thoughts?”¹⁸⁶

Clayton Hamilton, on the other hand, convinced James that his son would do well to attend Professor George Pierce Baker’s renowned English 47 playwriting seminar at Harvard University.

That June in New London, a passionate courtship took place between O’Neill and a local nineteen-year-old named Beatrice Ashe. If Maibelle Scott had been his first true romance (his marital tryst with Kathleen was anything but romantic), “Bee” Ashe—my “Bumble Bee,” as he called her—was his first true love. The depth of his passion has been preserved in more than eighty letters and over a dozen love poems dedicated to her, with titles such as “Just a Little Love, a Little Kiss,” “Just Me n’ You,” and “Ballade of the Two of Us.” One of these, “Speaking, to the Shade of Dante, of Beatrices,” was published in the New York Tribune in July 1915. The poem’s early title indicates O’Neill’s rakish competitiveness with the Italian bard’s adoration of his own great love, “‘My Beatrice’ (Being a few words with that guy Dante who wrote so much junk about his Beatrice)”:

Dante, your damozel was tall

  And lean and sad—I’ve seen her face

On many a best-parlor wall—

  I don’t think she was such an ace.

She doesn’t class with mine at all.187

Beatrice Ashe and Eugene O’Neill at Ocean Beach, New London, 1914.

(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

O’Neill gave Beatrice a scarab bracelet as a sign of his deep commitment and told her that he wished he could buy her an ankle-length sable coat and a silk bathing suit as well. (Maibelle Scott remembered Ashe as “breathtaking in a bathing suit.”) Ashe never agreed to marry him, though he asked her often and, according to her, “carried a wedding ring for two years hoping I’d change my mind.” Like Maibelle Scott before her, Ashe was devoted to O’Neill but soon came to recognize unresolvable personality conflicts. For one thing, he was ill at ease around children: “He had a sweet, gentle smile,” she said, “the sort he should have had for children but didn’t.” And though he pontificated ad nauseum about being true to yourself in the philosophical anarchist tradition, she felt it was only to his writing career that he hoped she would be true. Ashe was the soloist soprano at the Congregational church across the Thames, but O’Neill never respected her dream to sing professionally. Eventually, he recognized her frustration over his chauvinism and told her, in reference to Ibsen’s famous play about women’s subjugation to male power, A Doll’s House (1879), “You are no Doll Girl nor shall our house be a Doll’s House.”188 Unlike Scott, Ashe saved the scores of poems and letters he wrote her, hoping they would offer a window into the inner world of the loving young man whom she knew, “that some one sometime will recognize that sensitive, kind, patient, understanding man who asked so little of God … the Eugene O’Neill I knew and loved—but not enough.”¹⁸⁹

Thirst’s sales were paltry, and Clayton Hamilton published the only important review the book received (the others include one in the Baltimore Sun and a few glorifying notices in the New London papers). His critique reads much like thousands of reviews of O’Neill’s later work: “This writer’s favorite mood is that of horror. He deals with grim and ghastly situations that would become intolerable if they were protracted beyond the limits of a single sudden act. … He shows a keen sense of the reactions of character under stress of violent emotion; and his dialogue is almost brutal in its power.” In the years to come, after O’Neill’s celebrity had soared, early efforts like Thirst became immensely valuable, and O’Neill pointed out the irony that Thirst, “the A-1 collector’s item of all my stuff … has sold [for] as much as $150 a copy … the publisher at one time offered me all the remainder of the edition (and that was practically all the edition, for few copies were sold) at 30 cents a copy! With the usual financial acumen of an author, I scorned his offer as a waste of good money on my lousy drama!”190

O’Neill’s gratitude for Hamilton’s review was effusive, long-lasting, and sincere: “Do you know that your review was the only one that poor volume ever received? And, if brief, it was favorable! You can’t imagine what it meant, coming from you. It held out a hope at a very hopeless time. It did send me to the hatters. It made me believe I was arriving with a bang; and at that period I very much needed someone whose authority I respected to admit I was getting somewhere.”¹⁹¹ He considered this one of two “boons” Hamilton had conferred upon him in that crucial first year of serious writing from 1913 to 1914; the other was an “unvarnished truth” Hamilton had ruthlessly imparted upon meeting him by chance at New London’s Union Station.

One morning in late summer, O’Neill left Monte Cristo Cottage and went to the train station to mail two scripts to George C. Tyler, his father’s former advance man but now a top theater producer.¹⁹² Arriving early to ensure that his package would go out with the first pickup, he bumped into Clayton Hamilton and buoyantly explained what he was up to.¹⁹³ O’Neill naively expected Tyler to give his plays “an immediate personal reading and reply within a week—possibly an acceptance,” and he asked Hamilton what sort of timeline one might typically expect for a reply. Hamilton responded with a stinging reality check: “When you send off a play remember there is not one chance in a thousand it will ever be read; not one chance in a million of its ever being accepted—(and if accepted it will probably never be produced); but if it is accepted and produced, say to yourself it’s a miracle which can never happen again.”¹⁹⁴ Sure enough, George Tyler wrote in his memoir about the plays sent O’Neill to him that morning that he’d “take them in and forget about them, for a while—maybe read a little, but I wouldn’t take an oath I did that often, and I’m certain that I can’t remember at all what they were like.”¹⁹⁵ In point of fact, when O’Neill requested the scripts back after Tyler’s Liebler and Company fell into bankruptcy, he received them still sealed in the original envelopes.196

O’Neill later recalled having felt so self-assured and hopeful just before his ego-deflating tough-love encounter with Hamilton that afterward he’d “wandered off a bit sick.” In hindsight, however, he considered the wake-up call formative for his philosophy as a playwright—from that moment on, he steeled himself for the inevitable defeats of a working dramatist and vowed to “hew to the line without thought of commercial stage production.” “Yes, of all the help you were in those years,” he wrote Hamilton, “I think that bit ranks brightest in memory. It was a bitter dose to swallow that day but it sure proved a vital shock-absorbing tonic in the long run. It taught me to ‘take it’—and God knows that’s the first thing most apprentice playwrights need to learn if they are not to turn into chronic whiners against fate or quitters before their good break comes.” Nearing the end of his life, Hamilton dedicated the last of his books on drama criticism “to Eugene O’Neill, who began his career as one of my apprentices and is now fulfilling it as one of my masters.”¹⁹⁷

It Takes a Village

James O’Neill gravely doubted his son’s ability to succeed in George Baker’s seminar at Harvard, especially after the disastrous year at Princeton. But he also had great respect for Baker’s renowned skill for cultivating talent. O’Neill himself was thrilled, and going to Harvard would also, with impassioned apologies to Beatrice, have the added advantage of getting him out of New London.¹⁹⁸ Hamilton sent a letter of recommendation to Baker but urged his twenty-five-year-old protégé to write a formal letter to ask permission to enter the course, which he did. “Less than a year ago,” O’Neill wrote the Harvard professor, “I seriously determined to become a dramatist. With my present training I might hope to become a mediocre journey-man playwright. It is just because I do not wish to become one, because I want to be an artist or nothing, that I am writing you.”¹⁹⁹

Under separate cover, O’Neill sent Baker two one-acts, most likely Children of the Sea (Bound East for Cardiff) and Abortion, “from which,” O’Neill said, “you will be able to form a judgment as to my suitability for taking your course.”200 Baker accepted him, and by October, after a brief stint in New York trying to market his plays, O’Neill took the train to Cambridge and installed himself as a boarder on the ground floor of a German-speaking Mennonite home.²⁰¹ To O’Neill’s annoyance, his host family held Bible readings every morning after breakfast and asked the new boarder if he would like to join in. “Imagine it!” O’Neill groaned. “I begged to be excused.” An invitation to join them at Revere Beach was also turned down. “When I found out the children were to be taken along I backed out,” he wrote Ashe. “A long trolley ride with a couple of playful brats is my idea of one of the tortures Dante forgot to mention in the Inferno.”²⁰²

During the fall semester of 1914, O’Neill wrote two comedies, Dear Doctor and The Knock on the Door, and he collaborated with classmate Colin Ford on a full-length play called Belshazzar, about the fall of Babylon. (None of these plays has survived.) He then began a second play on the topic of abortion, this time full length. Professor Baker insisted that no respectable theater company would take on such a hot-button issue and persuaded O’Neill to select a less incendiary theme.²⁰³ O’Neill relented, in a way, if one considers violent anarchist revolutionaries combating wage slavery less incendiary.

That November, while he “mapped out a tentative scenario,” O’Neill boasted that “if it is ever produced—and it never could be in this country—the authorities will cast me into the deepest dungeon of the jail and throw away the key.” Indeed, at Harvard, O’Neill’s political voice had reached a high radical pitch. One classmate in Baker’s seminar described him as “intellectually … a philosophical anarchist; politically, a philosophical socialist.”²⁰⁴ (The latter, of course, would fade away, as philosophical anarchism concerned itself more with inner well-being than the socialist’s creed of effecting change from without.)

O’Neill’s The Personal Equation, initially titled “The Second Engineer,” was completed that spring. The play contains much of O’Neill’s early social philosophy—his despair over materialism, his belief in the destructive influence of Victorian propriety, and his sympathy for the working class. In the mode of outspoken socialist playwrights of the 1930s like Mike Gold and Clifford Odets, The Personal Equation mostly reads like agitprop, a form of literature O’Neill would come to denounce. (The play was later rejected by the Provincetown Players and never produced in his lifetime.) His most accomplished work from his days at Harvard, The Sniper, won honorable mention in Baker’s one-act play competition. The winning three plays were produced by the Harvard Dramatic Club, and he wrote Beatrice that it was just as well he’d lost: “Those amateur butchers on the Dramat. [Dramatic Club] would murder The Sniper.” Additionally, the three winners were all written by women, and O’Neill quipped with self-conscious envy that the “Harvard spirit and taste runs to the sort of clever plays women usually write. (Sorehead!)”205

The Sniper takes place in the Belgian countryside, when Germany’s Schlieffen Plan of the previous August 1914 called for an attack on France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Belgium refused to grant permission, so Germany disregarded the threat of international censure and entered the country by force. Few understood what this “Great War” was being fought over, but the “Rape of Belgium,” as it was called, outraged Americans, most of whom were otherwise oblivious to European affairs. “The sniper” of the title is a Belgian villager and expert shot with a rifle named Rougon, whose wife, son, and son’s fiancée are all killed. Rougon demands of the local priest how God could allow the killing of innocents. “God knows,” the priest replies. “Our poor country is a lamb among wolves” (CP1, 298). But he makes Rougon vow not to fight and promises to officiate at his son’s burial the following night. The two kneel beside the boy’s body to pray, but the meaningless words of the rite—“Almighty God,” “merciful,” “infinite justice”— incense Rougon, and he explodes in a fit of grief-stricken rage. When the Germans approach his cottage, Rougon opens fire and kills two men. He’s eventually detained, and the German captain orders his execution. Asked if he wishes to pray, Rougon disavows God and dies before the priest can administer a benediction.

Baker applauded The Sniper’s well-wrought structure, timely subject matter, and dramatic power. In fact, he believed it was the best play submitted for the competition; he didn’t “think it judicious,” however, for Harvard to “put on a war play” during actual wartime.206 O’Neill then showed The Sniper to his father, who shopped it around the vaudeville circuit in March 1915. O’Neill proudly wrote Beatrice that the play “has made a big hit with all the people he has had read it,” but James was told that censors would quash the play unless O’Neill “omitted all reference to Prussians, French, Belgians, etc.” Holbrook Blinn, a well-known vaudevillian, did “seriously consider” performing it, but again, only after the war had ended.²⁰⁷

Over that year, O’Neill’s male classmates looked on with envy as the women of Cambridge vied with one another for O’Neill’s attentions. “There was something apparently irresistible,” recalled one green-eyed student, “in his strange combination of cruelty (around the mouth), intelligence (in his eyes) and sympathy (in his voice). … From shop girl to ‘sassiety’ queen, they all seemed to develop certain tendencies in his presence.”²⁰⁸ O’Neill was immune to their advances and determined to stay true to Beatrice Ashe, “My Own Little Wife.” Though he returned to New London on weekends and holidays, he still mailed her a gush of treacly love letters (“Ah My Own, My Own, how I love you, and how the relentless hours drag their leaden feet when I am not with you!”), many containing love poems dedicated to her. He even sent her a photo of himself in his underwear taken by a Cambridge artist practicing studies in the nude, and he teased her over her refusal to have sex with him. His male biology, he said, ensured that they had done so in his dreams anyway: “Nature has foiled you in your effort to put restraint on the ‘Irish Luck Kid.’ It simply kinnot be did! I can’t keep your picture from my brain.”²⁰⁹

In the seminar, O’Neill’s manner was largely off-putting. One classmate remembered that “he would writhe and squirm in his chair, scowling and muttering in a mezzo-voce fearful imprecations and protests.” He mostly intimidated his fellow students at first, and “did not invite approach.” Politically, his “savage radicalism” was disconcerting, and his critiques were often terse and unexpected. Once he stormed out after discovering the lesson involved diagramming a play. He loathed Sundays and remained in his room, unspeakably bored, while the other students attended church: “Damn Sunday, say I, for the thousandth separate time.” But they all recognized O’Neill as the most talented among them, remarking to one another with more than a whiff of jealousy, “Well, I wonder how long it will be before he is the country’s greatest playwright?”210

Eugene O’Neill posing for an art student at Harvard University, 1914. He gave this photo as an unconventional gift to his girlfriend Beatrice Ashe.

(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

“He rarely contributed to the discussion,” a student said of O’Neill’s input in class, “but when he delivered himself of a remark, it was impressive. We felt that Gene had things to write about because he had lived—Greenwich Village, the sea, South America—while the rest of us had led sheltered lives.”211 O’Neill met with Baker regularly to discuss his progress, and one night they even spent hours in the plush study of the professor’s Cambridge home smoking his gold-tipped cigarettes late into the evening (“almost unprecedented to give up a whole evening to one student,” O’Neill boasted to Ashe). Baker asked him if “his preference for grim and depressing subjects was not something of a pose.” O’Neill responded that it wasn’t, that to him “life looked that way” after his years as a sailor and down and out in Buenos Aires and New York. O’Neill told Ashe that Baker had plied him for tales of his “adventures along the Ragged Edge,” and O’Neill “saw that even he was forced to acknowledge that I have knocked about a bit.”²¹²

In the end, Baker concluded that his pupil demonstrated great promise but also that his skills to “manage the longer forms” required fine-tuning. O’Neill’s trouble lay not so much in creating plausible characters but rather in his tendency to place them amid the entanglements of a melodramatic plot.²¹³ When Charlie Webster, the actor from the tabloid Monte Cristo tour, ran into O’Neill in New York, he asked him whether he’d learned anything from Baker and received an unequivocal no. But by the mid-1930s, O’Neill remarked that Baker had been teaching his playwriting seminar “back in the dark ages when the American theater was still, for playwrights, the closed-shop, star-system, amusement racket.” Only Baker’s students, he contended, could “know what a profound influence Baker exerted toward the encouragement and birth of modern American drama. It is difficult these days … to realize that in that benighted period a play of any imagination, originality or integrity by an American was almost automatically barred from a hearing in our theater. … The most vital thing for us, as possible future artists and creators, to learn at that time (Good God! For any one to learn anywhere at any time) was to believe in our work and to keep on believing. And to hope. He helped us to hope.”²¹⁴

Back in New London, Beatrice Ashe was ill with a fever through most of the summer of 1915. This was just as well, as her desire for O’Neill had been steadily cooling. And aside from submitting a few treatments for screenplays (without luck), his writing was going nowhere, and he never returned to Harvard. Baker heard that O’Neill’s “means … made this impossible,” and James O’Neill was in fact out of work, though the New London press made it sound as if producers were knocking down his door. His popular appearances at the Crocker House bar and the exclusive Thames Club never let up, and a few local politicians even tried to convince him to run for mayor. James demurred with his characteristic Irish charm: “Every politician seeking office aspires to the Presidency of the United States. If I were to enter politics, I should want to make that my goal and I can’t be President because I was born in Ireland, God bless it!”215

That fall, James and Ella checked into the lavish Prince George Hotel on Twenty-Eighth Street, while Jim and Eugene preferred the low-rent Garden Hotel around the block at 63 Madison Avenue on the corner of Twenty-Seventh Street.²¹⁶ Scandal alluringly permeated the hotel’s atmosphere. America’s preeminent architect Stanford White, designer of the old Madison Square Garden just across the street, was sharing a room there with Evelyn Thaw in 1906, when Thaw’s millionaire husband, Harry Thaw, in one of the nation’s most sensational crimes of passion, unflinchingly shot White three times in the face at a rooftop party at the Garden across the street.²¹⁷

The Garden Hotel’s barroom sold 5¢ beers, and during their many extended benders there, the brothers O’Neill made the acquaintance of a colorful gallery of characters, several of whom, like James Byth and his South African associates before this, would resurface as characters in O’Neill’s plays. “There was good food at the Garden, and it was a good place,” O’Neill said. “The circus men who stayed there I knew very well. Not only the circus men, but the poultry men, the horse breeders and all others who displayed their wares at the old Madison Square Garden. Used to meet them all in the bar. One of my old chums was Volo, the Volitant, a bicycle rider whose specialty was in precipitating himself down a steep incline and turning a loop or so in the air. Volo is now a megaphone man on one of the Broadway sightseeing buses. Billy Clark is his real name. Jack Croak was another. He used to work on the ticket wagon of the Willard Shows.”²¹⁸ O’Neill became an avid fan of the grueling six-day bicycle races at Madison Square Garden’s indoor track, a spectacle of physical and mental endurance that into his later years remained, along with baseball, football, and prizefighting, one of his favorite lifetime diversions.

The Garden Hotel (center) and the old Madison Square Garden.

(FRANK M. INGALLS PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, CA. 1901–1930. COURTESY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

O’Neill also drank at O’Connor’s Pub at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, a Greenwich Village hangout patrons called the Working Girls’ Home, best known for its former bartender, the future poet laureate of England John Masefield. O’Neill reconnected with his old friend Lou Holladay too, who by that time was running a bar called the Sixty Club, after its address at 60 Washington Square. Sixty competed with his sister Polly Holladay’s restaurant for being the epicenter of the Village bohemian scene; but on December 29, Sixty was shut down, and Holladay spent several months in jail for operating without a liquor license. After the marshals had served Holladay with a “dispossess” and took him into custody, the New York Tribune ran a piece titled “‘Sixty’ Is Dead; Long Live Polly’s!” (Holladay was to be sentenced that day, but the Tribune reported that his impending incarceration hadn’t prevented his sister Polly and her friends from planning a festive New Year’s Eve costume party at Webster Hall.)219

Greenwich Village, the storied Manhattan neighborhood south of Fourteenth Street and north of Houston, is best known for its red- and brown-brick townhouses, its picturesque alleyways and side streets, and its closely packed clusters of cafés, restaurants, and saloons. The Enlightenment-era urban planning of Manhattan’s grid pattern, designed in 1811, falls away south and west of Washington Square, where the streets descend back to the cow-pathed chaos of New Amsterdam. By 1915, the Village’s bohemian culture, then thriving among the area’s German, Italian, and Irish immigrants and for which the Village has been legendary for well over a century, had reached its maximum romantic allure. “Some said in those days,” the avant-garde writer Djuna Barnes recalled in the mid-1910s, “that you could not get any nearer to original sin than renting a studio anywhere below Fourteenth Street.”²²⁰

In retrospect, then, it’s just as well O’Neill hadn’t returned to Harvard that fall. His time in the Village was not about writing, per se (though he did submit Thirst and Bound East for Cardiff to the Washington Square Players, an ambitious new drama group that summarily rejected both)—rather, it was more about abandoning the child-self that had possessed him for too long. In a pleading letter to Beatrice Ashe the previous March, when she had threatened to break up with him for another man, O’Neill referred to himself as “your tearful little boy.” And when a couple of weeks later she expressed mother love for him as opposed to romantic passion, he said, “Why not? … I promise to always be your child. Where you are concerned, like Peter Pan, I shall never grow up.”221 But that winter, the Village would teach Pan to believe in himself before he could learn to fly.

O’Neill soon became a regular at the Golden Swan Café on the southeast corner of West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, a dive bar its patrons referred to as the Hell Hole. In the back room, gaslights “flickered wanly, both startling and inadequate,” as one observer put it, and out front, a moth-eaten stuffed swan on painted lily pads collected dust in a glass display case. Food was ordered and retrieved through a jagged hole in the wall—the sandwich or bowl of spaghetti or stewed tomatoes you could get were all pretty good, considering the orifice they had come out of. Leftover scraps were dispatched to a pig that the bar’s Irish American proprietor Tom Wallace kept in the basement for garbage disposal. To order a beer, customers had to buzz a bell about a half dozen times until they heard one of the bartenders roar Wallace’s name, at which point they could be sure their order was on its way.²²² Women were required to use a discreet “family entrance” on Fourth Street, but they did so under a glare of scowling disapproval from Wallace’s two bouncers, Lefty Louie and John Bull, who didn’t like women in the bar; believing they “brought trouble and police.” Louie and Bull would appear in O’Neill’s late masterwork The Iceman Cometh as Chuck Morello and Rocky Pioggi, and Wallace himself would be immortalized as Harry Hope, the local Tammany politician and owner of Harry Hope’s Bar, where O’Neill’s epic tragedy takes place.223

The Golden Swan Café, a.k.a. “the Hell Hole,” at Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, circa 1900. The Hell Hole was razed in 1928 and is now site of the Golden Swan Garden.

(PHOTO BY ROBERT L. BRACKLOW. COURTESY OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

“Much of [O’Neill’s] best work came from the time when he was bumming around,” wrote O’Neill’s friend and future collaborator the labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. “When he was the companion of sailors and when he sat in the Hell Hole with a bunch of bums. … He liked the people from the lower depths.” “There was a smoky quality,” she remarked of the Hell Hole’s interior, “Something at once alive and deadly.” At the bar in front, truckers often bragged to O’Neill about crates of contraband they’d “pinched,” and he befriended Joe Smith, a professional gambler and the black crime boss of “Cocaine Alley” around Cornelia Street. Mary Vorse remembered Smith with admiration as “a chieftain though a small man and shabby. Not bothering to be flashy but about him was the authentic air of a ruler.” Agnes Boulton, soon to meet O’Neill at the Hell Hole and become his second wife, described Smith as “the boss of the Negro underworld near the Village … [whose] tales were startling.” Smith’s white spouse would often be seated next to him, and the pair were gracious to outsiders. Smith, a Village native, first ran a gambling house, then became legit with a day job as an auctioneer for the Wise Auction Company.224 But it was for his close friendship with and influence upon O’Neill that he’d be remembered best, and he’d later be portrayed in Iceman as the good-hearted gambler Joe Mott.

It was also at the Hell Hole that winter that O’Neill befriended the Hudson Dusters, an infamous West Side Irish gang that claimed the bar as its headquarters. The Dusters included the likes of “Knock-Em-Dead” Bolan, “Big” Kennedy, and “The Rabbit” Crosby, a revolver-toting mob of “cocaine crazed young men,” as one journalist labeled them, whose exploits were scrutinized closely by the police and sensationally covered in the New York press. According to Agnes Boulton, the Dusters thought highly of O’Neill as “a two-fisted drinker, one of their own kind,” and Mary Vorse recalled that the gangsters “all accepted him as an equal and didn’t question him.”²²⁵ O’Neill recited poetry to the Dusters at the Hell Hole, typically The Hound of Heaven, and they became so devoted to the aspiring writer that they once offered to steal a coat for him when he was cold. All they needed was his size. He politely declined.

“One remembers the Hudson Dusters,” wrote the New York writer Harry Golden in a satiric sketch of the organization’s rise and fall, as “a gang of toughs who hung out in Greenwich Village. The Dusters terrified the Bronx. They were the scourge of the Palisades. The police precincts always had their eye out for the appearance of the Dusters. What happened to the Dusters was that the Bohemians began to move into Greenwich Village. These poets and artists and writers thought the Dusters were charming fellows. The Bohemians used to recite their poetry aloud at Duster meetings whether the Dusters wanted to hear or not. Eugene O’Neill found their conversation stimulating. … When the Dusters realized none of these painters and writers and poets were afraid of them, sullenly the gang broke up and the Dusters all found gainful employment.” As comical as this association between gangsters and bohemians must have seemed to an astute observer like Golden, the Dusters were a public menace. “In spite of the Rabelaisian quality of Wallace and his companions,” Vorse said, “the Hell Hole was sinister. It was as if the combined soul of New York flowed underground and this was one of its vents.”226

Wanting to live closer to the crowd at the Hell Hole, O’Neill moved from the Garden Hotel into a boardinghouse at 38 Washington Square West. He was soon kicked out for not paying his rent, however, and the landlady retained his trunk of extra clothes and books as collateral until he returned with the $46 he owed. That spring, after countless nights spent with heads down on a table in the Hell Hole’s back room, O’Neill and a new friend, an older Irishman named Terry Carlin, found an apartment just down the block from the Hell Hole, which they shared with the journalist Jack Druilard and affectionately dubbed “the Garbage Flat.” (Druilard, O’Neill said, “was momentarily—and miraculously—‘in the bucks,’” so he could pay the first month’s rent.) Decades later, O’Neill remembered the Garbage Flat “fondly and vividly. … It continued to be unfurnished except for piles of sacking as beds, newspapers as bed linen, and packing boxes for chairs and tables. … Toward the end of our tenancy, there was a nice even carpet of cigarette butts, reminding one of the snow scene in an old melodrama.”²²⁷

Terry Carlin wasn’t a writer (that involved too much exertion), but he was a world-class talker steeped in philosophy. Jack London knew Carlin well from their early days as activists in California, and he thought of Carlin as a kind of mystic, as did many of the anarchist contingent in America at the time, though just as many others thought of him as a laughable crank. O’Neill and Carlin whiled away their hours drinking and smoking and reading Friedrich Nietzsche and volumes of Eastern philosophy that Carlin recommended, like Mabel Collins’s Light on the Path (1885); but time and again O’Neill found himself too swamped in the miasma of drink and its aftereffects to do any serious writing. “After I’d had a quart and a half of bourbon,” he told a reporter in 1946, “I could walk straight and talk rationally, but my brain was nuts. If anybody suggested that I climb up the Woolworth Building, I’d be tickled to death to do it.” Instead, he took advantage of this nearly year-long hiatus in playwriting to methodically train his mind to think like a dramatist, first in dialogue, then scene changes, then acts, based on the scores of plays he’d read by this time—Strindberg, Ibsen, the Greeks, even romances and melodrama.228

O’Neill did muster enough wherewithal to volunteer for Revolt, an anarchist weekly helmed by another Hell Hole associate, Hippolyte Havel. The paper had offices in the basement of the soon to be defunct Ferrer School, but it was shut down after three months, along with the Ferrer, for its vocal opposition to World War I. O’Neill reveled in the romance of political rebellion, bragging to Ashe about his abbreviated tenure at Revolt that he was “one of the group that helped get the paper out every week. We all narrowly escaped getting a bit to do in the Federal pen.”²²⁹ Meanwhile, Terry Carlin had attracted big trouble from the opposite direction—the anarchists themselves. Carlin had been falsely accused of colluding with the federal government, informing agents of the whereabouts of the anarchist group that had bombed the Los Angeles Times Building in 1910, taking twenty-five lives in the process. The actual snitch, Donald Vose Meserve, was Carlin’s friend, and evidence had been found in Meserve’s apartment pointing to the connection between them.²³⁰

The whirl of accusations against Carlin from the nation’s radicals prompted author and journalist Hutchins “Hutch” Hapgood to publish an impassioned plea in Revolt that February titled “The Case of Terry.” Hapgood was a respected authority on such matters: over the previous two decades, he’d penned sketches and book-length studies on anarchists, socialists, labor unionists, immigrants, bohemians, free-love advocates, prostitutes, and thieves. He’d published a book back in 1909 chronicling Terry and his ex-girlfriend Marie’s vagabond life together called An Anarchist Woman, which became something of a bohemian manifesto and solidified Carlin’s legacy as an anarchist folk hero. Eventually counting among his cohort the philosophers William James and George Santayana; painters Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; fiction writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway; political activists, John Reed, “Big Bill” Haywood, and Emma Goldman; and, of course, O’Neill himself, Hapgood appears, Zelig-like, on the ground floor of nearly every major intellectual achievement of the modern era. (In 1920, after cavorting together for several years, Hapgood and O’Neill found themselves together on an overnight train; O’Neill reported that the pair of them “sat up in a deck stateroom and theorized the universe to sleep until about midnight. I have grown to love Hutch. He’s a peach!”)231

Despite Hapgood’s best efforts, however, Carlin continued to be hounded over his damning association with Meserve. “When Donald was suspected,” Hapgood wrote, “but before his guilt appeared openly by his testimony on the witness stand, Terry clung to the idea of the boy’s innocence. It was a terrible shock to him. His faithful soul would not suspect, until the definite proof came.” Carlin’s alleged collusion with the Feds would harass him and taint his reputation, such as it was, to his death; as Hapgood remarked of the accusations, “The human mind tends to harbor a doubt once suggested. Such is the terrible character of suspicion.”²³² The controversy over Carlin and Meserve would later serve as the models for the tormented relationship between Larry Slade and Donald Parritt in The Iceman Cometh.

For his part, O’Neill had reached a dead end finding a theater group to produce his plays in New York; and writing while living hand-to-mouth and perpetually drunk in the Garbage Flat and at the Hell Hole had proved impossible. It was time for a change.

Hapgood rented a summerhouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he headed with his family that May. As well as Hapgood and his wife, the writer Neith Boyce, the journalist Jack Reed, and Hippolyte Havel were planning to go there that summer. Reed had met with a few of the former Washington Square Players, including George “Jig” Cook, at the Working Girls’ Home that winter. Together, Reed and Cook intended to carry on with an experimental drama group launched in Provincetown the previous summer.²³³ That’s where O’Neill and Carlin would go.