“Now that I look back on it,” Eugene O’Neill mused in 1923, “I realize that I couldn’t have done better for myself [as a playwright] if I had deliberately charted out my life.” Indeed, O’Neill’s experiences in New York, New London, at sea, and on the vaudeville circuit shaped his future ideas, plots, and characters, and thus equipped him, along with his determination to “hew to the line,” to forge a modern American drama. Whether college dropouts, prostitutes, war veterans, vagabond sailors, has-been revolutionaries, or members of O’Neill’s own family, these ghosts at the stage door brought philosophical and psychological depths that even the most open-minded American theatergoers might never have believed possible.

Before O’Neill, producers had been painfully slow to accept such characters as these on the stage, given their hidebound view of theater as a profit-making industry, what O’Neill disgustedly referred to as “the closed-shop, star-system, amusement racket.” Few American plays had yet to transcend the Victorian tastes of the era—historical romance and melodrama. And the most powerful commercial force of the time was the contract and booking duopoly run by the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shubert Brothers.

Managed by booker Charles Frohman, the Syndicate reflected the growing industrial order by standardizing plays based solely on profit potential, privileging melodramatic plots that pit good against evil, with good always winning out. The understood requirement for booking a production through Frohman was, above all else, a happy ending. The Syndicate, also known as the “Trust,” was founded in 1896, and for more than a decade it often stymied the impassioned efforts of playwrights like Clyde Fitch, James A. Herne, Percy MacKaye, Rachel Crothers, and even the theatrical giant David Belasco, to produce a lasting American drama. The Shubert Brothers, according to one observer, “aimed at and almost succeeded in controlling the American theatre by coercion, bribing critics, boycotting newspapers, blackballing actors, and hogtying managers and owners of theatres.” Finding themselves “debarred” time after time at venues across the country, theater professionals “finally succumbed one by one, the playwrights listened to their commercial dictators, managers of minor theatres became their henchmen.” In this way, the majority of American plays between the Civil War and World War I were written and produced with moneymaking stars in mind, and playwrights were viewed as hired guns rather than artists, much as screenwriters were soon to be regarded during the reign of the Hollywood studio system.

By the 1910s, what became known as the “Little Theatre Movement” boldly answered the modern call for a distinctly American drama, confronting head-on the cultural and political debates then roiling in both smaller communities and the nation at large. Baltimore’s Vagabond Theatre, Manhattan’s Neighborhood Playhouse and Comedy Theatre, the Chicago Little Theatre, and the Boston Toy Theatre soon inspired copycat venues throughout the United States in truly off-off-off Broadway locales like Ohio, Indiana, and even South Dakota. Then, in the fall of 1916, after two summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the members of the experimental theater group known as the Provincetown Players introduced Greenwich Village, and soon the world, to their two greatest dramatic discoveries: Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. The Players’ defiant mission was “to establish a stage where playwrights of sincere, poetic, literary and dramatic purpose could see their plays in action and superintend their production without submitting to the commercial manager’s interpretation of public taste.”

ACT II: “To Be an Artist or Nothing”

The stupidity of our theater at the present time, with but little qualification, is of an excellence so signal and arresting that it is certain to reawaken the latent interest in the playhouse. By virtue of its very astounding magnitude it is certain to attract again to the theater such erstwhile rebels as, exasperated by merely mediocre plays and merely mediocre mummering, until now have remained steadfastly away.

—GEORGE JEAN NATHAN, 1916

The great hope of the future lies in the fertilization of the large by the little theater, of Broadway by Provincetown … in the region of Washington Square and Greenwich Village—or ultimately among the sand dunes of Cape Cod—we must look for the real birthplace of the New American Drama.

—WILLIAM ARCHER, 1923

Washed Ashore at Land’s End

O’NEILL AND TERRY CARLIN stepped down off the Dorothy Bradford’s gangplank onto Provincetown’s Railroad Wharf in late June of 1916. Slick with seagull droppings and cod guts and strewn with tangled nets, the Railroad Wharf functioned as a fish-wagon railway stretching at least one hundred meters out into Provincetown Harbor. Fishing was the town’s only cash source, and the briny fumes of the daily catch steamed up off the harbor’s more than fifty wharves.

The Dorothy Bradford, named for a Mayflower passenger who, in the winter of 1620, toppled overboard into the black maw of Provincetown Harbor and drowned, was a four-tiered iron ferry that carried up to 1,650 passengers daily from Boston’s Rowe’s Wharf to Railroad Wharf.1 The heartrending tale of the vessel’s namesake mirrors much of O’Neill’s thematic territory: the horror of an untimely death, the legacy of Puritan New England, the treacherous nature of life at sea, and, in terms of the ferry itself, the soul-destroying transition from the sail power of old to the factory-like steam engines of the modern age. The Mayflower’s crew had estimated, before setting sail for Plymouth Rock, that within the protected water of the Provincetown Harbor “a thousand sails may safely ride.” A more accurate estimation, from 1875, was three times that.2

The two Irish “wash ashores” scored $10 from Hutch Hapgood, then moved into a sailmaker’s loft overlooking the harbor on the “East End” of the main thoroughfare, Commercial Street. The vacant space was usually inhabited by Bayard Boyesen of the Ferrer School. Hapgood was a friend of Boyesen’s, as he was of all anarchists, and O’Neill and Carlin had known him from the Ferrer. (He’d also been a contributing editor at Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine when O’Neill published his first poem, “American Sovereign,” in May 1911.)³ The loft’s owner, John Francis, was a portly man whose mother was Irish and whose father was a Portuguese fisherman “with rings in his ears.”⁴ Francis didn’t drink or smoke himself but was a tolerant, generous host to impoverished bohemians, like O’Neill and Carlin, who did a great deal of both. “Twenty-five dollars till the snow flies,” Francis told his tenants at 377 Commercial Street, known as Francis’s Flats. “This loft won’t be warm in winter.”⁵

John Francis ran a general store on the ground floor of his apartment building, and a sign out front entreated his customers, “Please loaf in the rear!”⁶ Followers of this edict would find a wood stove set up in a back room around which they could warm up after a swim or a walk and converse. One visitor described the shop as “a great hulking place, heaped high with the miscellany common to old time village shops where one can purchase everything from candy sticks to kerosene.” The welcoming ambiance Francis nurtured for his tenants is immortalized by Provincetown’s “Poet of the Dunes,” Harry Kemp, in a eulogy written after Francis’s death:

With that slow speech not slow in apt reply,

With that smile that was too kind to be sly,

He will surprise us, rising from his chair

To greet us with his fostering friendship there!7

O’Neill felt equally tender about the landlord. When Francis’s obituary in 1937 highlighted his friendship with O’Neill, the recent Nobel laureate was sincerely touched: “I feel a genuine sorrow. He was a fine person—and a unique character. I am glad the article speaks of him as my friend. He was all of that, and I know he knew my gratitude, for I often expressed it.”⁸

Hutch Hapgood’s wife, Neith Boyce, had cobbled together an amateur theater group the previous summer in Provincetown with Hapgood, the director George “Jig” Cram Cook and his wife Susan Glaspell, an emergent playwright, along with about twenty other writers and artists.⁹ Their goal was to outshine the Washington Square Players, a thriving but to their mind overly cautious theater group that they themselves had helped found in 1914. Their plays were initially performed at Hapgood and Boyce’s house, the Pinehurst, at 621 Commercial Street. On the first evening, they read Boyce’s one-act Constancy, a farce based on a burning romance between Jack Reed and the Greenwich Village doyen Mabel Dodge. The designer of the set was Robert Edmond Jones, Jack Reed’s roommate from Harvard who was, like O’Neill, a former student of George Pierce Baker. The space was so cramped that the front deck of the house served as a makeshift stage while the audience watched through the living room’s picture windows. For their second play of the evening, Suppressed Desires, Cook and Glaspell’s send-up of faddish bohemian life, the audience sat outside while the players performed within. But as their ambition swelled, the group demanded more space.

In August 1915, for $2,200, the writer Mary Heaton Vorse, who’d first brought the Hapgoods to Provincetown back in 1911, bought a fish house on Lewis Wharf, a broken-down Grand Banks cod-fishing pier several blocks down from her and her husband Joe O’Brien’s place. The group soon christened it the Wharf Theatre and adopted the name “The Provincetown Players at the Wharf.” The wooden structure was twenty-four to twenty-six feet tall and wide and thirty-four to thirty-six feet long; once they’d cleared out the discarded nets, rusty anchors, and rotted oars and dinghies, it was ideal for a makeshift theater. Carpenters installed a ten-by-twelve-foot stage, and there was a massive rolling door at the back that could be opened if a play warranted the harbor as a backdrop. Scores of wooden planks were set across kegs and sawhorses, for a seating capacity of about a hundred. Before electricity was installed, a few members operated lamps and lanterns with tin reflectors as footlights that projected a flickering glow upon the stage. But with its darkly weathered walls, cracked floorboards, and perpetual draft, the theater was a firetrap; as a precaution, the Players posted sentries during productions with shovels and buckets of sand. Financially, after Vorse’s initial payment, the space was a boon. No production in the summers of 1915 and 1916 ran over $13 in expenses.10

“Terry,” Susan Glaspell asked Carlin on a stroll along Commercial Street that June of 1916, “haven’t you a play to read us?” “No,” he replied. “I don’t write, I just think. And sometimes talk. But Mr. O’Neill has got a whole trunk full of plays.”¹¹ Terry was hyperbolizing; O’Neill had actually brought with him a copy of Thirst and a wooden box just big enough to carry a half dozen or so manuscripts. On the top of the box were stamped the words “Magic Yeast.”¹²

On July 1, Hutch Hapgood sent word to Mabel Dodge, who also spent her summers in Provincetown but decided to remain in New York for a few more weeks, that “Terry Carlin and O’Neill (son of James O’Neill) have taken Bayard’s studio.” “The play fever is on,” he declared, and O’Neill was one of the most “enthusiastic in our circle.”¹³ Of course, they’d all heard of his father James, the celebrated “Monte Cristo,” but few had made the acquaintance of his young son Eugene. Dodge clearly hadn’t, and, as Jack Reed’s close confidante and ex-lover, she’d made it her business to keep abreast of all the movers and shakers of Greenwich Village.

The Wharf Theatre, Provincetown, where O’Neill premiered as a playwright in the summer of 1916.

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

The same day Hapgood established that Eugene O’Neill had become a member of the Provincetown group, July 1, the Players’ famed precursors, the Irish Players of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, had temporarily foundered. Actors were threatening to disband as a response to the high-handed attitude of their more professional-minded stage manager, the playwright St. John Ervine. “Rebellion is in the air in Ireland,” the drama tabloid New York Review reported, referring to the Easter Rising of the previous April during which Sean Connolly, an actor for the Players, had been the first rebel to die, “and it is not strange that The Irish Players should have become infected with it.” The Review continued that Lady Gregory, playwright and patroness for the Abbey Theatre, was feeling “very much grieved over the collapse of the company.”14

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the members of the Provincetown group were just beginning to creatively and socially cohere. Together, they sprawled on the beaches and swam in the ocean, congregated at one another’s houses for dinner and drinks and hunkered together at local bars like the Atlantic House—all the while, Susan Glaspell recalled, “talking about plays—every one writing, or acting, or producing. Life was all of a piece, work not separated from play.” The painter Marsden Hartley dubbed this period “The Great Provincetown Summer,” a time in which O’Neill wrote drama, fiction, and poetry, drank lots of whiskey, took long swims in the harbor, and practiced various forms of stagecraft along with playwriting, including his least favorite—acting. He embraced Jig Cook’s idea that “the art of the theatre cannot be pure, in fact cannot be an art at all, unless its various elements—play-writing, acting, setting, costuming, and lighting are by some means fused into unity.” For the Players, the term “amateur” wasn’t a condescending slur; rather, it signaled a break from the “professional” theater, which connoted a witless adhesion to outdated rules of drama that hampered self-expression and artistic innovation. O’Neill’s advice for aspiring playwrights, offered thirty years later, was a pared-down description of what he’d learned from his own humble beginnings in Provincetown: “Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage; light it, learn about it. When you’ve done that you will probably know how to write a play … if you can.”¹⁵

During rehearsals at the Wharf, they would dive into the harbor to cool off, with O’Neill always plunging in ahead of the pack. Mary Vorse compared his swimming prowess to that of “a South Sea Islander.” Reed showed off to his fiancée, the flamboyant political journalist Louise Bryant, by diving forty feet into the water off the peak of the fish house. (Such a stunt could only be safely accomplished during high tide, a lesson Max Eastman, the visiting Masses editor, discovered later that same afternoon—the hard way.)16

Jack Reed, as Marsden Hartley aptly phrased it, was “one of those rare specimens who crashed through Harvard and came out on the other side ‘alive.’”¹⁷ Louise Bryant had just that January left her husband, the dentist Paul Trullinger, in Portland, Oregon, to run off with the radical reporter. Also an Oregonian, Reed had been visiting family in Portland for the holiday season, after which he lured Bryant back to Greenwich Village and then out to Provincetown. A dark-haired enchantress with melancholy eyes and a wistful smile, she was instantly enamored with the taciturn Irishman. He was younger than she by several years, but who could ignore those scorching, soul-piercing black eyes? She also shared O’Neill’s pride in being an Irish American for whom a nonconformist lifestyle had replaced religious faith.

Reed and Bryant occupied 592 Commercial Street, down the block from Hapgood and Boyce, and they’d hired Hippolyte Havel, the Revolt editor, as their “chief cook and bottle washer.” Max Eastman, who lived across the street, remembered Havel as a “long-haired, owl-eyed, irrepressibly intellectual, and conscientiously irresponsible anarchist.” Terry Carlin, he said, loafed “with the determination of a Navajo brave,” while Havel “outwitted work instead of attacking it head-on.” As a result, given Reed and Bryant’s equal disdain for housework, their home was “barnlike in its physical aspect,” bare of furniture and other amenities. Nonetheless, Reed, Bryant, and Havel always had plenty of food and beds available for guests to sleep off a night’s debauch. “Don’t have anything to do with those two bums,” Havel grumbled when O’Neill and Carlin first arrived at the house, drunk as lords. “You’ll be sorry if you do.”¹⁸ Ignoring Havel’s admonition, Bryant ordered him to serve O’Neill and Carlin coffee, but O’Neill’s hands shook so that he could barely keep the cup level. Bryant helped steady it to his mouth and asked where he planned to stay.19 “He said he wanted to get a place where he could live simply,” Bryant recalled later, since he and Carlin had to live on about $20 a month from O’Neill’s father. Bryant suggested they abandon Boyesen’s studio and set up camp for free at a fisherman’s shack on the beach right across Commercial Street from her and Reed.²⁰

Marsden Hartley, who’d just arrived from Paris and was in town as a summer guest of Reed and Bryant’s, remembered that O’Neill and Carlin lived in their net-strewn fisherman’s shack “like sailors, slept in hammocks and lived most of the time out-of-doors, with their door open to the sea.” Hartley never forgot the image of hoary-headed Carlin standing for hours at his misshapen doorway. “How clearly I see his gnarled profile against the ruffled sea,” he wrote, “ruminating over what indescribable pasts, stroking the surfaces of life with a prophet’s tenderness, gnawed too persistently with hungers rich in emotions, thoughts, and the wiser way of knowing things, earned at what terrible cost.” A sign above O’Neill and Carlin’s door welcomed visitors with three words: “GO TO HELL.”²¹

“Terry understood me,” O’Neill mused about his time with the affable old anarchist. “He was always the same. If I was bored it didn’t affect him, he didn’t get bored and unhappy too. If I felt like a few drinks, he felt like a few drinks too.” Carlin could also handle his friend’s black Irish doldrums better than anyone. “Cheer up, Gene,” he’d brusquely declaim, “the worst is yet to come!” Susan Glaspell was so taken by their friendship that she jotted down a play idea titled “Misfits”: “Terry’s philosophy on Gene ‘Every soul is alone. No one in the world understands my slightest impulse.’ ‘Then you don’t understand the slightest impulse of anyone else.’”²²

Terry Carlin in Provincetown.

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

O’Neill’s choice of The Movie Man, his one-act play about actual Hollywood filmmakers’ cynical gold digging during the Mexican Revolution, as his tryout at Jack Reed and Louise Bryant’s wound up being an unfortunate lapse of judgment. It was a a misfire that he would attempt in the years to follow to wipe from historical memory.23 His decision was surely meant to impress Jack Reed, who in the fall of 1913 had reported as a war correspondent during the Mexican war in a widely hailed series for Metropolitan magazine. O’Neill based his protagonist Jack Hill in The Movie Man on the actor/directors Christy Cabanne and Raoul Walsh, backed by producers Harry E. Aitken and Frank N. Thayer of the Mutual Film Corporation, who filmed Pancho Villa’s exploits across Chihuahua, Mexico, in the spring of 1914. The studio brokered a lucrative deal for Villa: The general was granted 20 percent of the film’s revenue to allow cameramen to be embedded with his troops on rebel raids against loyalist forces.²⁴ “To make sure that the business venture will be a success,” the New York Times reported two days after Villa accepted the deal, “Mr. [Harry E.] Aitken dispatched to General Villa’s camp last Saturday a squad of four moving picture men with apparatus designed especially to take pictures on battlefields.”25 It’s an absurd fiction, however, reported as fact by the press and perpetuated by O’Neill, that Villa agreed to restrict his battles to camera-friendly daylight or that he reenacted battle scenes to accommodate the American camera crews. Titled The Life of General Villa, Aitken’s silent film—part fiction, part gruesome reality—was released on May 9, 1914, just a month before O’Neill dashed off his first and only surviving draft of The Movie Man.

The Players rejected The Movie Man outright, understandably enough, and O’Neill most likely destroyed this revised draft soon after. But if a long-term lesson had begun to sink in, along with the Players’ subsequent refusal to put on The Personal Equation, it was O’Neill’s ultimate recognition that propaganda had no place in his dramas. Jack Reed was a radical; agitprop was his stock-in-trade. O’Neill was an artist, and he learned that political avowals like the anti-interventionism of his revised Movie Man, however satiric the intent, leave audiences feeling emotionally empty and their views unchanged. Political arrows, he came to realize in the years that followed, kept sharpest when left in their quiver.

But then, at Cook and Glaspell’s house only a few days after The Movie Man fiasco, July 16 or 17, O’Neill read them Bound East for Cardiff.²⁶ The one-act sea play takes place on a steamship and depicts the round-robin from port to sea and back to port again, where the crew’s meager wages are blown on prostitutes and whiskey. Most of the dialogue concerns a sailor dying in his bunk named Yank, who confides his final thoughts to his long-time shipmate and best friend Driscoll, an Irishman. Yank confesses that he’d always secretly wished that he and Driscoll could start a farm together in Canada or Argentina but had never admitted this to his companion for fear of being made fun of. “Laugh at you, is ut?” Driscoll responds. “When I’m havin’ the same thoughts myself, toime afther toime” (CP1, 196). The relationship conveys strong homoerotic overtones, and in a moment of touching remembrance, Driscoll reminisces about adventures they shared at exotic ports of call: Buenos Aires, Singapore, Port Saïd, Sydney, Cape Town. O’Neill’s word choice “bound” for the title (which he’d changed from “Children of the Sea”) indicates more than their route across the Atlantic to Wales; these sailors are “bound” to the sea without hope of escape. This script the Players accepted unanimously.

Setting up for Bound East for Cardiff at the Wharf Theatre in July 1916. O’Neill is on the stepladder, Hippolyte Havel is seated at center, and George “Jig” Cram Cook is at right with the pole.

(COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK)

On July 28, 1916, Bound East for Cardiff opened on a double bill with Louise Bryant’s morality play The Game. The Game was nearly turned down, but set designers William and Marguerite Zorach improved upon Bryant’s pedestrian work by devising an Egyptian-style set. O’Neill directed Bound East and, in spite of his stage fright, took a one-line part as the second mate who steps into the forecastle and asks, “Isn’t this your watch on deck, Driscoll?” (CP1, 194). Jig Cook was cast as the dying sailor Yank. Seated among the rapt audience, Susan Glaspell remembered the evening well: “There was a fog, just as the script demanded, fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavor of the sea while the big dying sailor talked to his friend Drisc of the life he had always wanted deep in the land, where you’d never see a ship or smell the sea. … It is not merely figurative language to say the old wharf shook with applause.”27

Adele Nathan of the Baltimore little theater group the Vagabond Players (who’d rejected Bound East for Cardiff the previous winter) was there at the Provincetown opening. She asked O’Neill for a copy of the play and found that the “rehearsals had been conducted from a single working script, and that was in sad condition.” O’Neill offered to type up a fresh copy for her but warned her apologetically that he was a terrible typist, and the process would take a while. Nathan gave O’Neill $15 for the retype and the play was produced in Baltimore that fall; given that O’Neill never earned any royalties from Thirst, this paltry sum was notably the first money he received as a working dramatist. It was a fitting play for such an initiation. Bound East for Cardiff, O’Neill said later, was “very important from my point of view. [In] it can be seen, or felt, the germ of the spirit, life attitude, etc., of all my more important future work.”²⁸

Then it was Susan Glaspell’s turn. Within ten days, she completed Trifles, now a hallmark of modern drama, and the Players produced the one-act on August 8. In the years to come, Mary Vorse placed their achievements that summer among the top innovations of the era: the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell; the first flight of the Wright brothers and Henry Ford’s creation of the Model T; Sigmund Freud’s breakthroughs in psychoanalysis and the achievements of the moguls of the budding Hollywood filmmaking industry.²⁹ Millennia before, Seneca of Rome, a fellow dramatist, had classified “luck” as what happens when preparation meets opportunity. The Provincetown Players, above all the most ambitious of them, O’Neill and Glaspell, now had both.

Cook and Glaspell owned a modest whitewashed house at 564 Commercial Street across from the Wharf Theatre, which they inhabited with their cat, Carnal Copulation, or “Copycat” for short. Each day, Cook labored away in the front yard constructing theater props and household improvements while Susan tapped out their living on the typewriter within. Max Eastman characterized the couple’s lifestyle as an old-fashioned tableau of American domesticity, “an atmosphere of Christian conservatism, a quiet piety” in which Cook was the “husky, brown-skinned farmer” and Glaspell “an overtired but sweetly conscientious farmer’s wife.”30

Honest-spoken and hardworking to a fault, Cook and Glaspell were typical midwesterners in temperament but with eastern-style intellectual bravado. A larger-than-life personality among the Players, Cook was a modernist thinker who worshiped the Greeks. (He’d translated Sappho and often thought in Greek.) But he was keenly aware that writing wasn’t his strong suit. It wasn’t a lack of ability so much as a lack of self-discipline. Cook’s zeal for “social creativeness” and the commitment of his volcanic energy to O’Neill’s and Glaspell’s work, Eastman observed, might best be explained “by his abstract wish to be a genius combined with an inability to retire into a lonely corner and get down to concrete work.”³¹

In contrast to Cook, and most of the other Players, O’Neill excelled at locking himself away to write for days on end. “O’Neill was quite savage in his determination to find solitude,” said Harry Kemp, who like Cook preferred communal activity to writing. “No early Christian martyr sought his hilltop remote from men, in order to be with his God, with greater zest than O’Neill, solitude to be alone with his work.”³²

Cook’s impassioned speeches commanded a room with the grandiloquence of an orator in the ancient tradition of Cicero. When he spoke, pipe jutting from his mouth, jaw clenched, everyone listened. If he demanded total silence, he got it. A more festive atmosphere? He got that too. When O’Neill spoke, a rarity in itself, he mumbled out of the side of his mouth. He avoided eye contact, Kemp recalled, but instead “looked straight through those in his presence.” If he didn’t want to talk with you, which was generally the case, he just turned and walked away without a word.33 One day, the usually gregarious Kemp tested O’Neill’s taciturn nature by walking past him with a simple “Hello.” Sure enough, though O’Neill resented intrusive small talk, he found Kemp’s off-handed dismissal of him even more upsetting. As Kemp strode away, he heard “this pat-pat-pat like a big St. Bernard dog” behind him. “You know,” O’Neill said, “I’d have liked to be a prizefighter … but I got a blow once that loosened all my teeth.”³⁴

Jealousy was not an issue with Cook, not publicly at least, and his management and leadership skills were indispensable to the group’s success. Cook had “all the resources of the University” at his mental disposal, according to Hapgood, but he was no academic snob or well-heeled layabout.³⁵ Back in Iowa he’d run a truck farm and taught English at the University of Iowa, where he studied as an undergraduate before moving on to Stanford University. (By the time Cook was finished with theater and had moved to Greece in 1922, after a falling-out in which the Players became too professional for his taste, he left behind an impressive record: he had cultivated as many as fifty writers and ushered over one hundred plays onto the boards.)

Cook was the indisputable “big man” among the Players, O’Neill said later, “always enthusiastic, vital, impatient with everything that smacked of falsity or compromise, he represented the spirit of revolt against the old worn-out traditions, the commercial theater, the tawdry artificialities of the stage.”³⁶ In his autobiography, Hutch Hapgood neatly sums up Cook’s critical role in O’Neill’s career: “Eugene O’Neill might never have been heard of in the theatre, certainly not for long after this [summer], had it not been for the work of George Cram Cook. Every writer needs a sympathetic background; that background was entirely absent from Broadway at the time and, as far as O’Neill’s personality was concerned, it was absent everywhere. The man who felt O’Neill’s personality vividly and who created, not only the social enthusiasm for it, but the definite mechanical body and setting, was George Cram Cook.”³⁷

Cook, like his new protégé O’Neill, was also a passionate devotee of the bottle. At Provincetown soirees, he christened wine casks with names like Bacchus, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and he invented “Fish House Punch”: four parts three-star Hennessey brandy, two parts rum, two parts peach brandy, two parts lemon juice, and a heap of sugar poured into a bowl over a giant block of ice.38 At Cook’s gatherings, O’Neill would squat on the floor apart from the others and hold his tongue until he’d gotten thoroughly intoxicated. Agnes Boulton explained later that for O’Neill, especially among this cohort of boisterous thespians, drinking whiskey “seemed a needed prop to meet the situation, rather than an escape from it. … In more important things, alcohol enabled him to do what he wanted to do—not what was expected of him, or was the conventional thing to do.” Harry Kemp similarly recalled that “in the midst of a party he kept that aura of being apart. When he spoke it was hesitatingly and haltingly. It was only when he drank that he expressed himself fluently. Then he was worth listening to.”³⁹

Mabel Dodge arrived late that July and looked on as the Players habitually got inebriated, though not, to her mind, in an obnoxious way: “Everyone drank a good deal, but it was of a very superior kind of excess that stimulated the kindliness of hearts and brought out all the pleasure of these people. Eugene’s unhappy young face had desperate dark eyes staring out of it and drink must have eased him. Terry of course was always drunk. A handsome skeleton, I thought. Jig Cook was often tippling along with genial Hutch. The women worked quite regularly, even when they, too, drank; and I envied them their ease and ran away from it.”⁴⁰

Hutch Hapgood laid down his own unapologetic love of alcohol in his memoir “Memories of a Determined Drinker; or, Forty Years of Drink,” for which he failed, unsurprisingly, to find a publisher. The title might reassure a prospective editor that the book was yet another temperance memoir warning readers against the “demon rum.” Nothing could be further from the truth. “Without the glass Cook’s genius would never have been,” Hapgood wrote, and then linked O’Neill’s debt to whiskey to its inevitable conclusion: “It is fair to say that without Cook the Provincetown Players would never have existed. His was not the original idea, but his was the complex activities which made it possible. … Without him O’Neill’s talent would not, at any rate for many years, have found a means of putting itself over.”41 By the time Hapgood wrote this exhortation, 1932, O’Neill was in his judgment “our only important American playwright,” and without the Players’ drinking habits in Provincetown that summer, he said, the state of American theater as we had come to know it would not exist.⁴²

One of the despised rules of nature, of course, is that heavy whiskey drinking invariably leads to its less delightful result: the hangover. And O’Neill’s hangovers were epic. “There was no such darkness as Gene’s after a hangover,” Mary Vorse recalled. “He would sit silent and suffering and in darkness. You could have taken the air he breathed and carved a statue of despair of it.”⁴³ O’Neill’s New London friend Art McGinley, who later came to visit O’Neill in Provincetown, described his mercurial friend’s drinking habits this way: “Gene was a periodic drinker, and once started wouldn’t stop—I guess he couldn’t stop—until he was really sick. He was the most trying morning-after drinker I’ve ever known. He would gloom up and not say a word, or else talk of suicide, he was so disgusted with himself. But when he stopped drinking, he would work around the clock. I never knew anyone who had so much self-discipline.”⁴⁴

O’Neill wrote prolifically that summer despite his hangovers. Along with revising The Movie Man, he turned out the one-act Before Breakfast, the short story “Tomorrow,” and a full-length comedy about pretentious bohemianism entitled Now I Ask You. The story of an upper-middle-class young woman with a studied affectation of Greenwich Village radicalism, Now I Ask You echoes the Players’ mordant view of affluent would-be radicals who disingenously promoted revolutionary politics and free love merely as an outlet to escape bourgeois ennui. And along with Cook and Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires, Neith Boyce and Jack Reed wrote similar satires on the subject, Constancy and The Eternal Quadrangle. As a Boston Post reporter noted, “The Provincetown Players are so modern that they not only write about modern things, but satirize them.”⁴⁵

That July, O’Neill plunged into an affair with a determined nondrinker, Louise Bryant. Bryant’s father had been a severe alcoholic, and for a long time she disdained people who drank to excess. (In her later years, however, she fell to drinking so heavily that her second husband, the wealthy diplomat and a close friend of Reed’s from Harvard, William C. Bullitt, would win custody of their daughter Anne on the grounds that she was an incompetent mother.)46 O’Neill’s fruitful summer of writing was attributable in part to Bryant, as she helped him control his whiskey intake just enough to work. Reed knew about the affair, of course, but his one-act play The Eternal Quadrangle suggests that extramarital affairs bothered him little, and he himself had been recently involved in a long-standing and public romance with the married Mabel Dodge.⁴⁷

A rare photograph of O’Neill and Bryant together, the only known portrait of them offstage, captures the two lovers languidly sunning on a cottage’s front steps. In this picture, published here for the first time, Bryant poses for the photographer with a fetching if somewhat strained smile. O’Neill is gripping an uncooperative cat and appears more hungover than haunted. Reed, as it happens, is seated off camera over O’Neill’s left shoulder; a highly circulated photograph of O’Neill and Reed from that afternoon, this time with Bryant off camera to O’Neill’s right, confirms that the three were relaxed and happy in each other’s company.⁴⁸

Placed side by side, the two images produce an almost cinematic quality. One can imagine that Reed had just snapped his friend out of a dark mood with a wisecrack. O’Neill is also, fittingly enough, separating the couple. Of the two, a stranger might think it was O’Neill, not Reed, who would soon marry the coy-looking young woman beside him.⁴⁹ (The three-way romance was later dramatized for the big screen in the 1981 film Reds with Diane Keaton as Bryant, Jack Nicholson as O’Neill, and Warren Beatty as Reed.) Bryant, who was often seen following O’Neill around in Provincetown, initiated her romance with the playwright on the Fourth of July with a love poem:

Dark eyes

you stir my soul

Ineffably.

You scatter

All my peace.

Dark eyes,

What shall I do?

The sentiment was entirely mutual. “When that girl touches me with the tip of her little finger,” O’Neill told Carlin, “it’s like a flame.”50 Two days later, he sent her this impassioned, only recently found reply:

Blue eyes.

You stir my soul

Ineffably.

You scatter all my peace.

Blue eyes,

What shall I do? …

I dream

In a great wide space

Where horizons meet

And the unattainable is possessed.

Blue eyes.

The sky is blue,

I dare not look at it

Because my soul is lonely.

Don’t you know then

Why,

Blue eyes?⁵¹

Terry Carlin arrived at his and O’Neill’s shack one day delivering a pleading note from Bryant: “I must see you alone. I have to explain something, for my sake and Jack’s. You have to understand.” At the ensuing liaison, Bryant informed O’Neill that she and Reed weren’t sexually active, that they lived like siblings because of a kidney ailment he suffered from that required surgery. It was true about the kidney at least (he would have surgery that fall), and O’Neill and Bryant’s affair began in earnest; it would last, on and off, for nearly two years. In theory, O’Neill was still involved with Beatrice Ashe. In one of his last letters to her, sent on July 25, he implored Ashe to visit him on the Cape, as he didn’t have the money for a ticket to New London; but he understood that by then she’d been mulling over her future, and he had no place in it.

Louise Bryant and Eugene O’Neill in the summer of 1916, Provincetown.

(COURTESY OF HENRY W. AND ALBERT A. BERG COLLECTION OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)

Eugene O’Neill and John Reed in the summer of 1916, Provincetown.

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

The Players as a group neither liked nor respected Bryant. Most of the men considered her a “bitch,” a “nymphomaniac,” and a “whore”; the women resented her preferential treatment at the theater as exclusively the result of her relationships with Reed and O’Neill.52 “Just because someone is sleeping with somebody,” one of them scoffed when Bryant’s The Game was accepted for the double bill with Bound East for Cardiff, “is no reason we should do her play.”⁵³ “Bryant was not really a playwright,” another quipped, “she only slept with one.”⁵⁴ News of the affair quickly spread to New York, and Mabel Dodge had gone to Provincetown to see if, under the circumstances, she might win Reed back: “I thought Reed would be glad to see me if things were like that between him and Louise—but he wasn’t.”⁵⁵

In an unpublished memoir, Bryant offers a telling anecdote about Reed’s reaction to her sexual relations with O’Neill. Reed had a friend, Fred Boyd, whom he’d rescued from prison after Boyd was arrested at the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. From that point on, Boyd was loyal as a hound. According to Bryant, when Boyd found out about the romance brewing between O’Neill and Bryant, he showed up drunk at Reed and Bryant’s house at four o’clock in the morning and demanded $40. When Reed asked what the money was for, Boyd told him it was to buy a gun to murder O’Neill. Reed responded by kissing his fiancée tenderly and telling Boyd to go home and sleep it off. Later that morning, he went to O’Neill’s shack and warned him, “Boyd was drunk last night and shooting his face off around town. If you hear any stories don’t pay any attention to them. And I wish you and Terry Carlin would take all your meals with us for a while.”⁵⁶ For most of their friends, as Suppressed Desires and Now I Ask You satirize, the belief in free love was so much bohemian posing. On this matter, Louise Bryant and Jack Reed were no posers.

By the end of the summer, the Players were desperate to schedule plays for a final bill and thus premiered a second O’Neill play, Thirst, on September 1. Unlike the storied premiere of Bound East, this bill, which included a revival of Cook and Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires, wasn’t the Players’ finest hour. O’Neill, darkly tanned and lithe from swims in the harbor, took the role of the mulatto sailor, the largest role of his truncated acting career, while Cook played the gentleman and Bryant the erotic dancer. During rehearsals, the Zorachs had fashioned as symbolic a set for Thirst as they had with Bryant’s The Game, but O’Neill wanted the production to seem as realistic as possible and refused them; thus, instead of a symbolic ocean, the water was represented by long yards of “sea cloth with someone wriggling around underneath it.”57 Bryant wanted to bare her breasts in the final scene, since O’Neill’s stage directions called for the dancer, driven insane by thirst, to tear off her bodice, but the Players opted for discretion. (Bryant was indeed comfortable in her own skin. Along with nude sunbathing in Provincetown, William Carlos Williams said that at his first encounter with her in New York that fall, she wore “a heavy, very heavy white silk skirt so woven that it hung over the curve of her buttocks like the strands of a glistening waterfall. … There could have been nothing under it, for it followed the very crease between the buttocks in its fall.”)⁵⁸

A performance of Thirst at the Wharf Theatre in August 1916. From left, Louise Bryant appears as the dancer, George Cram “Jig” Cook as the gentleman, and Eugene O’Neill as the mulatto sailor.

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

Though no formal review of Thirst’s premiere exists, a Boston Sunday Post article entitled “Many Literary Lights among the Provincetown Players,” announced in September, less than a week after the Players had officially incorporated on the fourth, that “the Provincetown Players, like the Irish Players, are trying to get away from stage convention, to act naturally and simply, to be on the stage much as they are off the stage. … It begins to look as if the American drama may be richer for the fun and the work of the Provincetown Players this summer. They have put on two plays by Eugene O’Neil [sic], a young dramatist whose work was heretofore unproduced and who, they are confident, is going to be heard from in places less remote than Provincetown.”59

Jig Cook didn’t need a reporter to tell him what he already knew.When his friend Edna Kenton, a founding member of the feminist group Heterodoxy, arrived for a visit in early September, Cook immediately ushered her out to the Wharf Theatre. Kenton remembered the tides rolling beneath the wide, sand-strewn planks while she gazed about at the “net-hung, shell-hung, seaweed-fronded walls.” Then Jig thrust open the backdrop to “let in the sparkling sea.” “You don’t know Gene yet,” he told her. “You don’t know his plays. But you will. All the world will know Gene’s plays some day. … Gene’s plays aren’t the plays of Broadway; he’s got to have the sort of stage we’re going to found in New York.”⁶⁰

Below Washington Square

On the train ride back to New York early that October 1916, after his triumphant premiere in Provincetown, O’Neill stopped over at New London for a brief visit with his parents. Never one to let go of a bad idea, O’Neill rewrote The Movie Man that week in New London as the short story “The Screenews of War.”⁶¹ Bryant joined him there, and the elder O’Neills approved of her if only because she’d evidently curtailed O’Neill’s drinking.⁶² O’Neill’s friend Jessica Rippin remembered Bryant wandering around New London barefoot wearing a pair of O’Neill’s trousers. “After the way he’d raved about her,” Rippin said, “I expected something special, but she was a mess, she looked like a Greenwich Village character who needed a bath.”⁶³

By the time O’Neill was back in New York, Jig Cook had located the Provincetown Players’ next stage: 139 Macdougal Street, an 1840 brownstone for $50 a month just south of Washington Square. O’Neill proposed naming it the Playwrights’ Theatre, to which the Players voted a resounding “yea,” to highlight the new role of playwrights as controlling artists rather than Broadway lackeys. The cramped auditorium was built in the first floor parlor, with only a couple of feet left behind the stage for scenery changes. Because of fire laws, there was no box office, so ticket revenue could be collected only through seasonal subscriptions. The second floor housed dressing rooms, a lounge, an office, and a restaurant run by Christine Ell.64

O’Neill, with Lou Holladay and the freelance journalist, restaurant worker, and future speakeasy proprietor Barney Gallant, rented for $3 a month an unfurnished flat at 38 Washington Square, which reeked of horse dung from a nearby stable.⁶⁵ Gallant, like so many others, felt on edge around O’Neill, but understood over time that whenever O’Neill shared a tale from his past, “he was already shaping his plays; he was like a painter trying to fix a scene in his mind. He would watch us closely, gauging the effect his stories were having on us—we were, you might say, the audience.”⁶⁶

Over their six seasons of operation, the Provincetown Players produced works by an astonishing lineup of literary lights: along with O’Neill and Glaspell, Theodore Dreiser, Djuna Barnes, Mike Gold, Floyd Dell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other writers who were prepared to face off against the moral certitude of the American genteel tradition, with its stifling and arbitrary censorship laws, and the Theatrical Syndicate and Shubert Brothers’ systematic commercialization of Broadway. For this reason, they intentionally discouraged reviewers from attending their performances and sloughed off the age-old convention of offering them complimentary tickets.

“People drifted down to Macdougal Street because it was something of a lark,” Clayton Hamilton told an audience of three hundred at Columbia University in 1924; the makeshift venue was “a sort of intellectual substitute for going slumming.” “To go to the New Amsterdam Theatre and see ‘The Follies’ was mainly an expense,” he said, “but to go down to Macdougal Street and see the Provincetown Players was not an expense but an adventure.”⁶⁷ During one performance, for instance, a gang of Italian kids threw open the stage door, shouted “Go fuck yourselves!” and ran off down the block. The actor Charles Ellis, watching from the edge of the stage as perplexed audience members got to their feet, refused to allow his show to be so easily interrupted. Holding a shovel, a prop that his part required, high above his head, he broke the “fourth wall” and bellowed, “If anybody makes a move, you don’t listen to me, I’ll bury you all!”68

For a clubhouse to hold meetings and gather after performances, the Players appropriated Nani Bailey’s Samovar, a renowned Village café around the corner in a second-floor loft space and former art studio above a junk shop at 148 West Fourth Street. They painted the tables and chairs an assortment of colors and the crumbling brick walls and enormous rafters a rose red. The center of the restaurant featured an enormous working samovar to tap glasses of tea and wash down Bailey’s famously savory cheese sandwiches.⁶⁹ O’Neill’s frequent absence was a frustration. “Someone’s got to go and rake Gene out of the Hell Hole!” one of the Players would yell. “But it happened often,” Mary Vorse recalled, “that whoever went ‘to rake Gene out’ himself also had to get raked.” One Player after the other would go to the Hell Hole, just two doors down on Sixth Avenue, until the whole troupe had transferred to the bar.⁷⁰

The long stretches of time Jig Cook spent with his protégé O’Neill were often tense, even when the encounters were generously lubricated with beakers of Fish House Punch or quarts of Old Taylor bourbon, O’Neill’s preferred blend. O’Neill’s perpetual uneasiness, especially when sober, had a grating effect on Cook. In a letter to Glaspell that October, he grumbled that O’Neill’s temperament was irritably contagious: “O’Neill’s nervous tension is a thing that I feel instantly when I see him. I mean that I instantly catch it from him—I feel it myself in myself. Sort of anxiety complex. He likes to be with me since he discovered that I feel what he feels. But it isn’t good for me.”⁷¹

Cook also came to interpret O’Neill’s painful self-consciousness as a form of narcissism. “You’re the most conceited man I’ve ever known,” he said as he observed O’Neill staring, once again, at his reflection. “No,” O’Neill replied, “I just want to be sure I’m here.”⁷²

O’Neill’s unique skill as a playwright, in fact, was in large part due to his ability to drive people, both onstage and off, into the shadows of his own psychic torment, and he used it to advantage in his next play, Before Breakfast. An American version of August Strindberg’s The Stronger, Before Breakfast involves alcoholism, suicide, an extramarital affair, two illegitimate pregnancies, a miscarriage, and a housewife who quite literally nags her husband to death. “O’Neill didn’t care about the success of the play,” Provincetowner Edna Kenton said. “He cared only about the reaction of the audience to monologue, trick shocks, trick relief. It was a deliberate experiment for a definite result—the endurance of the audience.” “How much are they going to stand of this sort of thing,” O’Neill wondered before the December 1 opening, “before they begin to break?” O’Neill himself played the offstage hand of Alfred Rowland, a bohemian artist from a well-to-do family who reaches through the bathroom door for his shaving cream and then slits his throat. Having seen O’Neill in his biggest part, the mulatto sailor in Thirst, Harry Kemp joked that the playwright “was fonder of his part in ‘Before Breakfast.’” “The audience sees only the hand, which according to the script is long-fingered, sensitive, slender. Later a groan is heard. There’s a part that calls for delicacy, restraint and finish. To coordinate the hand and the groan. … Well, O’Neill did the hand and the groan, and a fine performance it was.”73 (This would be the last time O’Neill, or any part of his anatomy, would appear onstage.)

“My son,” O’Neill’s father James implored, “why don’t you write more pleasant plays?”⁷⁴ James had begun taking an active interest in his younger son’s budding theatrical career, and he stopped by to view a rehearsal or two of Before Breakfast. A resplendent contrast to the frayed white and gray woolens and cotton garments the Players wore, James conspicuously sported a fur-collared coat, a gold-headed cane, and an outsized sparkling diamond ring. Eugene was deferential to his father and consulted him, reported a bystander, William Carlos Williams, “when there was some point they had to solve about the play itself or its presentation.”⁷⁵ James interrupted the Irish beauty Mary Pyne, who starred as the sole onstage character, to coach her, “with the voice and gesture of Monte Cristo,” in his old-fashioned methods of acting. As the actor departed the theater that night, a few of the Players complimented him on his son’s “gifts and promise.” “Yes, yes,” James responded. “I think the boy has something in him.”76

Before John Reed’s kidney operation that fall, Bryant left O’Neill behind in the village and traveled with Reed to Innisfree, a cottage they’d found in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. After her departure, even Jim O’Neill began to worry about his brother’s excessive drinking, and he contacted Bryant to help talk him down off the ledge. Bryant tracked him down at the Hell Hole, looking filthier and more steeped in booze than she’d ever seen him, and coaxed him onto a bus to dry out with his parents. The elder O’Neills were staying at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights instead of their usual suite at the Prince George in Manhattan. They were most likely seeking the assistance of the Sisters of Charity convent nearby, where Ella had kicked her morphine habit in 1914. (In the fall of 1918, Ella would undergo a mastectomy, an experience that resulted in her temporarily returning to the drug.)⁷⁷

Reed and Bryant married in secrecy in Peekskill, New York, before Reed traveled alone to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on November 12 to have his kidney removed. During Reed’s convalescence, O’Neill and Bryant occupied his apartment on Washington Square. Bryant became unwell that November, and the gossips among the Villagers postulated that her illness was due to complications that had resulted from aborting O’Neill’s child. She relied upon the freethinking Village doctor Harry Lorber, who was known to treat such delicate matters as abortions, venereal diseases, and even the odd drug overdose with discretion.⁷⁸ Bryant and Reed both recuperated after a few weeks, but she carried on with her passionate affair with O’Neill.

The Players next put on O’Neill’s one-act Fog on January 5, 1917. Composed a year after the Titanic’s disastrous voyage in 1912, Fog is set on an oarless lifeboat lost off the Grand Banks. The principals, a poet and a man of business, argue over the poet’s assertion that success (material or otherwise), survival, and happiness can only be obtained when less fortunate souls are subjected to their opposite. O’Neill’s stage directions were highly ambitious for a theater as small as theirs—the play requires fog, a rising sun, falling ice, rolling swells, and two boats, among other special effects. The Sniper, O’Neill’s drama of World War I, was then staged on February 16, two weeks after the United States broke diplomatic ties with Germany. The Players put on The Sniper for precisely the same reason that Professor Baker and his father’s vaudeville friends had rejected it two years earlier, because of its timely subject matter, and they advertised The Sniper and two other antiwar plays as their “war bill.”79

The Players’ self-assured and capable new director, Nina Moise, first met O’Neill at the Samovar while O’Neill was talking to a few people about The Sniper. Moise was unimpressed: “He was so inarticulate I wondered how he ever thought he could write a play.” “Then I read ‘The Sniper,’ which was not,” she recalled in hindsight, “a very good play, but even so I remember my thrill when I read it—it had such vitality.” Though O’Neill found it nearly impossible to articulate his ideas to actors at this time, for directors, Moise said, “his scripts are fool-proof. The director can follow his stage direction and never go wrong.”⁸⁰ (For the 1917–18 season, Moise would direct his one-acts The Long Voyage Home and Ile in the fall and The Rope that spring.)

That March 1917, O’Neill stole himself away from the heady distractions of Greenwich Village and returned to Provincetown to write in peace. He was joined by the hard-drinking pulp fiction writer Harold de Polo, and they took a room at the Atlantic House while John Francis refurbished a suite of rooms for them in his apartment building. O’Neill had met de Polo at Lou Holladay’s bar Sixty in 1915, before it was shut down and Holladay went to jail. O’Neill had overheard de Polo scoff with some others at the bar that the bohemian Village crowd was a bunch of out-of-town exhibitionists. O’Neill interrupted to counter defensively that he was born on Broadway, and the ensuing conversation marked the start of an intimate bond with de Polo that would last for well over a decade. (They became such fast friends that de Polo was one of the few to whom O’Neill admitted that his mother’s aloofness was the result of her morphine addiction.)⁸¹

During this stay at the Atlantic House, where the owners hung a sign on the veranda, “Dogs and Artists Not Allowed!,” O’Neill completed what was to become his first hit play for a wider audience: In the Zone. Cashing in on a rampant fear of German invasion, the one-act takes place on the British tramp steamer Glencairn, the setting of Bound East for Cardiff but now loaded down with stores of dynamite and ammunition as it passes through a German U-boat zone. The paranoid crew, discovering that one of the seamen, Smitty, had stowed a black box in the forecastle, suspects it is a bomb and that he is a German spy with designs to destroy the ship.

It was thus an uncanny coincidence that O’Neill and de Polo were themselves arrested and charged with espionage on March 27. The local Provincetowners, whose wariness matched that of O’Neill’s fictional crewmen, had grown suspicious after observing O’Neill and de Polo taking long, meandering walks on the beaches and through alleyways of their village. Convinced the strangers were scoping possible German landing sites, a few residents reported them to the authorities, noting that one of them carried a mysterious black box (possibly O’Neill’s “Magic Yeast” box or a typewriter case). Officer Reuben R. Kelley soon arrested them at gunpoint while they were eating dinner at the New Central Hotel. “What for?” de Polo asked. “You know what for!” Kelly shouted back. They’d been seen “prowling around” the radio station in the nearby town of North Truro, he said, and, though the initial charge was vagrancy, they were suspected of espionage. Secret Service agent Fred Weyand of the Department of Justice was then called in from Boston to interrogate them in the Town Hall lockup. They were held for over twenty-four hours without access to a lawyer, but O’Neill’s identity as the son of James O’Neill was soon verified, and the young men were released. (The reaction among the locals wasn’t merely the result of unfounded wartime paranoia; a German U-boat was in fact spotted and fired at after it breached off Provincetown’s shoreline the following summer, 1918.)82

O’Neill, unaccustomed to demoralizing interrogations, left the station in equal parts infuriated and scared. Two of the detectives assigned to the case were staying at the Atlantic House as well, and they’d been tasked with monitoring O’Neill’s mail. “Well,” one of them would goad O’Neill at breakfast, “you got a letter from your mother, Gene, but your girl’s forgot you today, but someone sent you a knitted tie just the same.”83 The incident as a whole was later revisited by the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, while it was investigating O’Neill for treasonous political activity.

This story so closely approximates the plot of In the Zone it was nearly impossible to believe that O’Neill wrote the play prior to his discomfiting experience; nevertheless, O’Neill and de Polo insisted that it had already been written by the time of their arrest. O’Neill’s likely source for the play was a story printed in the New London Telegraph on September 9, 1912, when he was on staff there. Entitled “Box Mystery Alarms Many until Solved,” the article reports that an Italian shopkeeper in New London grew suspicious about a black box left in his care. Believing it might belong to the Black Hand terrorist organization, he notified the police. Upon inspection, the box was found to contain some men’s clothing and was duly retrieved by its owner.⁸⁴ Much later, in O’Neill’s 1940 work diary, he sketched out the plot of a comedy, “The Visit of Malatesta,” based on the life of Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta. In it, Malatesta visits a fictional version of New London. Although Italian Americans in the play consider him a regicidal hero, the mastermind behind the assassination of Umberto I in 1900 (actually killed by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci), the character, O’Neill writes, “denies he had anything to do with [the assassination]—terrorist group fanatics—true anarchism never justifies bloodshed.”⁸⁵

Wartime intrigues aside, O’Neill’s stay at the Atlantic House was one of the most industrious periods of his career. Along with In the Zone, he completed Ile and two more Glencairn plays, The Long Voyage Home and The Moon of the Caribbees. Ile is the story of a whaling captain’s wife who’s driven to insanity by her husband’s myopic pursuit of oil (the “ile” of the title). Based on the actual 1903 polar expedition of Captain John A. Cook and his wife, Viola Fish Cook, the fictional couple in Ile, David and Annie Keeney, are also clear stand-ins for James and Ella O’Neill. The Moon of the Caribbees, though, was O’Neill’s unrivaled darling of the group. First titled “The Moon at Trinidad,” the play takes place off the coast of Port of Spain, where his ship the Ikala had anchored en route to New York from Buenos Aires. With virtually no plot, more than twenty speaking roles, and no melodramatic elements that might have made for a box office hit, The Moon of the Caribbees was a radical departure even for O’Neill. “No one else in the world,” O’Neill told Nina Moise, “could have written that one.”86

O’Neill appeared “thunderstruck,” according to Louise Bryant, when she surprised him with an unannounced visit in mid-May. Jack Reed had been in Washington, D.C., conducting antiwar protests—and, it turned out, the occasional affair. Bryant, enraged in spite of her own blatant infidelity and claims of adherence to the free love movement, chose this as her breakout moment but only stayed with O’Neill for a week. Back in New York, she attained her journalistic credentials, with Reed’s help, just as the United States decided to join the weakened alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia against the German war machine. Now a certified, if untested, war correspondent, Bryant sailed to France under constant threat of U-boat attacks.⁸⁷

O’Neill wasn’t as keen for a firsthand observation of the Great War as Bryant or many other American writers of the time, such as Reed, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and Edith Wharton, to name a few. Once the draft was in place, he attempted to join the navy but was turned down for “minor defects which will not count in the draft.” He then sent a letter to Dr. Lyman at Gaylord Farm asking for a medical excuse to avoid the draft, given that “conditions in the camps and at the front are the worst possible for one susceptible to T.B. Is this so?” “I want to serve my country,” he said, “but it seems silly to commit suicide for it.”⁸⁸

That summer O’Neill submitted The Long Voyage Home and The Moon of the Caribbees to the Smart Set, a journal that advertised itself as dedicated to “enlightened skepticism” and was run by H. L. Mencken, the notorious enfant terrible of American letters. “I want these plays,” O’Neill wrote Mencken, “which to me are real, to pass through your acid test because I know your acid is ‘good medicine.’” Mencken published The Long Voyage Home in October 1917; he also accepted Ile that winter and published it the following May. Another prominent literary journal, the Seven Arts, published O’Neill’s short story “Tomorrow” in June, whetting O’Neill’s appetite to continue writing fiction as well as drama. The journal’s editor Waldo Frank didn’t like the story, although he published it at Louise Bryant’s behest (nor did he like O’Neill’s poem “I Am a Louse on the Body of Society,” since lost, which Bryant also passed along to him). He insisted upon significant changes, including the elimination of a melodramatic postscript. O’Neill envisioned “Tomorrow” as the first of a series of short stories based entirely on his life at Jimmy the Priest’s, “yarns in which the story-teller was to hog most of the limelight—a sort of Conrad’s Marlow.” But he couldn’t find a sustainable plotline, so he abandoned the series altogether.89 (He would return to the concept decades later, in dramatic form, as The Iceman Cometh.)

Terry Carlin arrived in Provincetown to join O’Neill that spring, and the two moved into another “Garbage Flat,” as they again named their quarters, this time at John Francis’s. O’Neill hung a sign on their door for passersby, “May wild jackasses desecrate the grave of your grandmother if you disturb me.”⁹⁰ On the rafters, he and Carlin etched their own adaptation of the guiding tenets of Mabel Collins’s book of mystical thought Light on the Path:

Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears!

Before the ear can hear, it must have lost it’s sensitiveness!

Before the voice can speak, it must have lost the power to wound!

Before the soul can fly, it’s wings must be washed in the blood of the heart!⁹¹

Once settled into the new Garbage Flat, O’Neill wrote at a breakneck pace, completing his one-act comedy The G.A.N. (a reference to Henry James’s waggish pet name for the ever-elusive “Great American Novel”), which he later destroyed, his short story “The Hairy Ape,” and the novella S.O.S. (based on his 1913 one-act play Warnings). “Sent my long story [‘The Hairy Ape’] to the Saturday Evening Post Monday,” he wrote a friend in September. “They might really take it and if they do it will mean some honest-to-Guard money. I’m pretty sure it will sell some place any way in the long run.” He’d written his most mature dramas to date over the previous months in Provincetown, but still sought the quick cash of popular fiction. “Here’s hoping!” he said just before sending off S.O.S., “I can certainly use a little money, divil a lie av ut!”92

O’Neill evidently had a minor fling that summer with Elaine Freeman, a painter associated with Independent Artists, the avant-garde cohort that included Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan, and Helene Iungerich, one of Freeman’s roommates in Provincetown. “Living in the Big Town on an author’s shoe-string, and a beggar’s mite extracted from a reluctant Pater,” he complained to Freeman about the prospects of another winter in New York, “is not my dream of the Perfect Life. It’s sure hell to nourish the instincts of a real artist in these degenerate days. The Coast, moreover, is a long step nearer the South Seas of my Visioning.” O’Neill gave Freeman an autograph manuscript of his Buenos Aires poem “The Bridegroom Weeps!” and wrote her several letters after her departure in September. In these unpublished letters, he details the state of his health (strong), his economic condition (weak), and the progress of his work (solid, but fiction, so ultimately futile). Lou Holladay had invited him to an apple orchard in Oregon owned by his fiancée, Louise Norton, who suggested he go out there to work and dry out if he wanted to marry her, and de Polo was hunting for a place for them to “bunk” in the New England countryside as well. Both propositions had their “charms,” he told Freeman, “as [de Polo] and I are lenient toward each other’s sins—as I and Lou are for that matter—and get along like real pals.” O’Neill also dreamed of moving to the South Sea islands and playing, for the rest of his life, on his “spiritual fiddle while modern civilization is destroyed by flames.”⁹³ Instead, he plunged back into the roiling conflagration of Greenwich Village.

Upon Louise Bryant’s arrival back from Europe on August 13, Jack Reed, wearing a white shantung suit and Panama hat to shield himself from the sweltering sun of a terrific heat wave, met her as she disembarked at the pier in New York. They had four days, he informed her, to pack before they steamed back across the Atlantic. The signs all indicated that a socialist revolution in Russia was a near certainty, and they were going to cover it. Bryant’s sojourn in France had largely been an uneventful disappointment, so she eagerly agreed to return.

O’Neill was devastated by the blow, but Bryant assured him that she could never stop loving him even while she was as far away as Russia. He promised to stay true to her, but that he would only remain so until November. Bryant wouldn’t return until March. O’Neill wired her cable after lovesick cable, but she rarely responded; when she did, her tone struck him as “cold and indefinite.” He began drinking more than ever, “all I could,” he informed her. “I refused to endure the ache, and drink drugged me to an indifferent apathy.” He conducted numerous one-night stands, he said, “in a spirit of revenge, against you, all women, myself for being heartbroken, and life in general.”94

It wasn’t long before O’Neill eased his yearning for Bryant with a strikingly beautiful, intellectually precocious nineteen-year-old political activist named Dorothy Day.⁹⁵ A recent college dropout, Day had just begun writing about labor issues for the Masses and the socialist newspaper the New York Call. O’Neill admired Day’s ability to drink with the best of them, sing “Frankie and Johnny” and, as she said later, quoting the nineteenth-century English poet Ernest Dowson, “fling roses riotously with the throng.” (But she denied the writer Malcolm Cowley’s future claim that she could drink longshoremen under the table. Cowley meant this a compliment, but Day considered it a malicious bit of libel that dogged her throughout her career.) The left-wing novelist and playwright Mike Gold, to whom Day was briefly engaged, had introduced her to O’Neill that fall, 1917, and regretted it immediately. Gold likened Day’s adoration of the burgeoning playwright to an adolescent’s crush on the high school rebel. She wanted more than anything to be a writer, and O’Neill was one of the Village’s most radiant new literary lights. Moreover, his evident love for Bryant made him all the more attractive to women in their circle. Still, though captivated by his intellect, Day felt he was not “really physically exciting.” She claimed they never slept together, that he never even tried to kiss her. Sometimes he would ask, “Don’t you want to lose your virginity?” but appeared glad when she rebuffed him.96

Rehearsals and performances at the Playwrights’ Theatre that season reliably concluded with the cast and crew trotting around the corner to the Hell Hole. “No one ever wanted to go to bed,” Day wrote of those autumn months, “and no one ever wished to be alone.”⁹⁷ By this time, the Hell Hole’s back room was as saturated with talk of Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Nietzsche, and Francis Thompson as it was tobacco smoke and the sour stench of stale beer. O’Neill could recite Thompson’s epic poem The Hound of Heaven by heart, all 182 lines of it:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

  I fled Him, down the arches of years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

  Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

Day had never heard the poem before, and she would stare at O’Neill enraptured while he sat with “his elbows resting on the table, chin cupped in hand, eyes looking inward and seeing none of us listening.”⁹⁸ She noted that he placed particular emphasis on a line that spoke to his doomed obsession with Bryant: “And now my heart is as a broken fount, wherein tear drippings stagnate.”⁹⁹ O’Neill delivered the poem “in his grating, monotonous voice, his mouth grim, his eyes sad,” she wrote in her autobiography, and his recitations, she added in an unpublished reminiscence, “Told in Context,” galvanized “an intensification of the religious sense that was in me.”¹⁰⁰ The spiritual awakening that followed inspired Day to begin attending St. Joseph’s Church in the Village.¹⁰¹ (Subsequently, she became a renowned leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, and her name has since been mentioned at the Holy See for canonization.)

Day recalled that by this time O’Neill was “surrounded by admirers.” “He was beginning to feel his powers,” she said, “and exult in them.” “One of the fine things about Gene was that he took people seriously, more seriously than the rest of us did,” Day remembered. “He took Terry Carlin seriously. He took Hippolyte Havel seriously, and almost no one else did. … Hip would get up in the center of the room, when he’d been drinking, and whirl around in exuberance. … We laughed at him, but not Gene.” Havel, for instance, was smitten with a lesbian named Rick Hornsby and used to chirp in his goofy way, “I’m her little doggie,” but O’Neill berated anyone who sneered at Havel’s oddball behavior. “This man has been in every prison in Europe. He’s suffered.” “We were revolutionaries,” Day said, “and were supposed to sympathize with the unfortunate, and we did en masse. Gene was very responsive to people who suffered.”102

Maxwell Bodenheim, “the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians” and a contributing playwright for the Provincetown Players that season, quoted O’Neill intoning his political credo that fall in the Hell Hole while flanked by two Hudson Dusters: “If the proletariat and the intellectuals and artists would only get together, they could rule the world. I mean the real ones—not the fake slobs on either side. The gangsters, gunmen, and stokers, joined to the few, important rebels among artists and writers, would make a hot proposition. … They’re all aristocrats in a different way, and they’re all outcasts from the upper worlds of society; and if their eyes ever open up to these resemblances, well, it’ll be goodnight government and middle classes! … This world will always be ruled by somebody, and the only trouble is that the sharpest minds and the strongest fists have never come together to polish off the job.”¹⁰³

“Turn Back the Universe”

The uptown production of In the Zone, O’Neill’s second Glencairn play, was greeted with high praise by almost everyone but its creator. Too much the mainstream thriller for the Playwrights’ Theatre, the one-act was accepted by the Washington Square Players, whose premiere on October 31, 1917, at the Comedy Theatre received a flood of glowing reviews. While the Provincetowners actively discouraged critics from attending performances, the Washington Square Players just as actively encouraged them, and In the Zone was the play that, according to Edna Kenton, “sprang [O’Neill] into the Broadway limelight.” Among other notices, it roused the New York Times to run a feature story with the tantalizing headline, “Who Is Eugene O’Neill?”104

The Times story celebrated the arrival of O’Neill, just as his early mentor Clayton Hamilton had predicted only a few years before, as the Jack London and Joseph Conrad of American theater: “He knows the haunts of the men when they are on shore, and he swaps yarns with them, not as an outsider but as one of themselves.” Although there were four short plays performed back-to-back at the Comedy Theatre, In the Zone took up three-quarters of the New York Times’s review of the evening, and the Globe and Commercial Advertiser gushed over the audacious newcomer as well: “I don’t know where this young man got his knowledge of the speech, character, and characteristics of seafaring men, but this is the second play he has written about them with remarkable power and penetration. He makes the sailors in the forecastle of a tramp steamer passing through the submarine zone live for you with a vividness that is quite astonishing. Not only that, but the thing is at various times intensely exciting, thrilling, pathetic, and ironical. … A young man who can write such a piece has a marvelous gift.”¹⁰⁵

O’Neill initially rejected a deal for a vaudeville tour, on the grounds of artistic integrity, but then decided that he couldn’t afford to turn down the $200 advance and $70 royalty a week (which he split with the Washington Square Players). They were the first royalties of his career and nicely supplemented the weekly $15 allowance he continued to collect from his father. The tour lasted thirty-four weeks but ended as the market for war stories wound down with the war itself, along with the rise of the 1918 flu pandemic.¹⁰⁶ (The flu claimed three times more lives worldwide than the war, with a death toll of 50 million, and the Provincetown Players weren’t immune; among the 675,000 Americans who succumbed to it were Hapgood and Boyce’s son Harry in 1918 and O’Neill’s New London pal and Provincetown leading man Hutch Collins the following year, 1919.) Seven Arts also paid O’Neill $50 for the script. Though the journal folded before it could appear, he still got paid the money, enough to keep him and Carlin well marinated at the Hell Hole and afford the down payment on one of John Francis’s flats in Provincetown summer.107

That fall, 1917, an Ohio State University graduate, James “Jimmy” Light, a handsome, blond twenty-two-year old with a dashing mustache and self-satisfied way of tilting his hat, had been accepted on scholarship into a master’s program in English at Columbia University and moved in with Charles Ellis above the theater at 139 Macdougal Street. As Light began to unpack, he heard hammering below and went downstairs. There he discovered three men shooting craps while a fourth hammered away at a shoddily built set of wood benches. One of the players was O’Neill, his dark eyes following the dice as they jounced across the floor. When Light criticized the workmanship of the benches, a saw was thrust into his hand. “I started sawing immediately,” he said. Then, as he was walking up to his flat with a load of books, the Players “tapped” him for the role of the English instructor in Susan Glaspell’s newest play Close the Book. Light was a quick study; by 1925, he had acted in thirty-four plays with the Players and had directed, reported the New York Times, “more plays by Eugene O’Neill than anyone else in America.”¹⁰⁸

Close the Book appeared on the same bill as O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home (just three days after In the Zone), a one-act play that’s set in a waterfront dive in London and dramatizes the perilous fate of sailors on shore leave. (James Oppenheimer’s Night concluded the evening.) The New York Tribune’s drama critic arrived too late on opening night to be admitted. Standing outside on Macdougal Street, he heard a ruckus within, “consisting chiefly of breaking tableware, punctuated at intervals by guttural male tones and the strident shrieking of a woman.” Inside the house was the Boston Evening Transcript’s reviewer, who averred of The Long Voyage Home, “The substance is the merest penny-dreadful tale, and if it did not carry clear illusion of reality it would be thrown into the rubbish-heap as melodramatic bosh.” “Even the hardened newspaper man,” he wrote, “is not likely to know that there are so many distinct and individual kinds of drunkenness as are here disclosed.” The inevitable result of this kind of sordid talk was that the Players’ subscription requests expanded to such an extent they had to begin performing seven nights a week. O’Neill’s sea play Ile opened next, on November 30, and once again, theater critics hailed O’Neill as American drama’s answer to Conrad and for exuding, like Jack London, a refreshingly masculine literary voice, but for the stage, a medium that up to then overwhelmingly catered to a female audience: “This writer, a son of the noted actor, James O’Neil [sic], has the faculty of writing ‘man stuff’ drama that, while gray in tint, is tense and gripping.”109

O’Neill exulted in his notoriety at first, but became weary of it before long. “It’s like everything else, I guess,” his character Stephen Murray in The Straw remarks of newfound literary success. “When you’ve got it, you find you don’t want it” (CP1, 783). Similarly, a few years later, O’Neill responded to Maxwell Bodenheim’s letter of congratulations by explaining his avoidance of Bodenheim’s beloved Greenwich Village scene: “Well, the saddest part of the ‘acclaim’ you mention is not that I take it seriously but that other people do, one way or another. Some hate me for it, or envy me, or like me, or use me, or flatter me—all for it—while they seem absolutely unable to see the me they knew ever again. Yet I’m sure I’m still that ‘me,’ and that I’m lonely, and that it is these stupid folk who change me by their suspicions into a suspicious one. Not that I don’t realize all this is inevitable—but it’s distressing and I’ve learned for my sensitive skin’s sake to duck and dodge.” O’Neill went on to Bodenheim that as his fame grew, he felt punished for it, always “eternally apologetic and self-consciously cringing, seeming to say: forgive me, good people, for having had my name five times in the Evening Journal.”¹¹⁰

Even worse than the jealousy stewing among the Village “branch of swine,” he complained to Louise Bryant, was the chattering, “serpent-tongued” innuendo of what he referred to as the “‘How is Jack’ tribe”: “How is Jack?” “Have you heard from Louise?” “Are they married yet?” “Is it true they married here before they left?” He could play their pretentious games, expertly when necessary, he told Bryant, but he’d come to loathe the “Tarantulas of the Village.” Most of the damning gossip involving O’Neill’s romantic conquests Bryant had heard was true, however. “Occasionally,” he admitted, “just to show I could and romance their thread-bare souls a bit—hence my reputation for indiscriminate love-making. Love? Great God, what a title you give it! You reminded me of the fact that we are both Irish, and yet you cannot be lenient to—blarney!”111

Jim O’Neill swore that his little brother Gene was wasting his talent by not working on Broadway; but this didn’t prevent him from enjoying such rewards of downtown life as Christine Ell’s beguiling company. Hutch Hapgood considered Ell, with her great height and carrot-colored hair, a character out of Dostoevsky (the Players’ unrivaled literary idol) and described her as “the Perfect Lioness.” Ell was married to the stagehand and amateur actor Louis Ell, who one night in late November 1917, stormed into the Hell Hole. Not finding Christine there, he shouted that he would divorce her, then marched out, slamming the door behind him. When Ell finally arrived at the bar, she announced that she was there to meet her latest lover—Jim O’Neill.

At around 10:30 that night, a twenty-five-year-old beauty named Agnes Ruby Boulton stepped into the Hell Hole’s back room to join Ell for a drink. Boulton, already a well-published fiction writer, had just moved to Greenwich Village from Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, where she’d been struggling to manage a dairy farm with her parents and two-year-old daughter, Barbara “Cookie” Burton. The ostensible child of Boulton’s first husband, James Burton, who she claimed had died under mysterious circumstances in Europe, Cookie had been left in the care of Boulton’s parents. Boulton was good friends with Harry Kemp and Mary Pyne, who’d visited her farm the previous summer and no doubt gave her the lowdown on recent happenings in the Village.¹¹² Once in New York, she checked into the Brevoort Hotel, hoping to land a factory job to earn some quick money and, perhaps, collect material to write about the inner lives of factory girls.

The Players gathered at the Hell Hole that night were struck speechless by how eerily Agnes Boulton resembled Louise Bryant. She was a more classic beauty than Bryant, but otherwise a dead ringer. O’Neill was paralyzed, gaping at her from his dark corner. By now his “type” was clear: slim of build (Boulton was five feet four and just over one hundred pounds), long of neck, dark of hair, high of cheekbone. Boulton remembered catching O’Neill staring at her in those first few moments in the back room as if “he had once known me somewhere.”113

Jim O’Neill swept in soon enough, flamboyantly dressed like a Broadway dandy with his signature black-and-white checked suit, bowler hat, manicured nails—even a carnation was securely inserted into the buttonhole of his jacket. He was drunk, as usual. “What Ho!” he roared into the murk of the Hell Hole’s back room. “Late? Yes! I got lost in the subway, looking for a big blonde with bad breath!” (After a glimpse at Boulton, Jim thought, “High cheek bones—she’ll get him.”)¹¹⁴ The two things that impressed Boulton most about Eugene O’Neill were, in her words, “that he was Irish” and “that he was a revolutionary.” She was also vaguely disturbed by what so many others had felt before her: the man projected an unnerving, contagious vulnerability, “that of being himself—an awareness on the part of others of his being always intensely aware of himself. … This would account for his shyness or whatever it was—which was really an intense self-consciousness.” “I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you,” O’Neill told her after escorting her back to the Brevoort that night. “I mean this. Every night of my life.”¹¹⁵

O’Neill and Boulton’s next encounter took place soon after at a party at Christine Ell’s Village apartment. For a long time, it wasn’t certain whether O’Neill would show. “Where is he now?” Ell shouted. “At the Hell Hole, drunk. Big guy among the gangsters!” When O’Neill did finally arrive, he refused to acknowledge Boulton. She took this as a challenge rather than a snub, and for a time pretended to be “quiet and uninterested.” After a while, she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Hello!” she said, looking him in the eye, “Remember me?” His response was polite but distant; a few minutes later, he stepped into the next room, took a pint bottle of whiskey from his coat pocket, drained it, and swayed back into the crowd. “With a violent, sardonic, and loud laugh,” Boulton recounted, he dragged a chair up to the mantelpiece where a large clock was ticking, stood upon it as if back in his Princeton days, and chanted,

Agnes Boulton.

(PHOTO BY NICKOLAS MURAY, © NICKOLAS MURAY PHOTO ARCHIVES)

  “Turn back the universe,

And give me yesterday.

  TURN BACK”—

O’Neill then opened the glass face of the clock and pried the big hand counterclockwise, his eyes fixed on the little hand as it followed along behind. After this strange communion with the clock, he made a beeline for Nina Moise. Those who knew him doubtlessly saw his odd behavior at Ell’s party as a call for Bryant’s return; but he confessed to Boulton afterward that he’d been trying to conceal his overwhelming desire for her. Either way, in the days to follow, O’Neill and Dorothy Day started to double date with de Polo and Boulton. De Polo, who was married, soon dropped out of the picture, and the remaining three, to use Boulton’s term, formed a ménage à trois.116

“I am more beautiful than Dorothy, even though I can’t keep a tune!” Boulton beseeched O’Neill inwardly. “Please look at me?”¹¹⁷ She accused Day of being envious of O’Neill’s attraction to her, a charge Day later denied. In fact, the reverse was true. For her part, Day thought Boulton was “much better-looking than Louise … but without Louise’s brains and sophistication.” Boulton had nothing to fear from Day, as O’Neill increasingly focused his attention on her; and Day, although she loved him as a friend and admired him as a writer, claims to have been more worried for Boulton than jealous. She believed he’d fallen in love with Bryant because Reed loved her, not for her own sake. “Gene needed a hopeless love,” Day said. “Jack was more in love with Louise than Gene was or could ever be. All Gene’s experiences were ‘copy’ to him. So I watched the Agnes-Gene association and hoped she would not be too hurt.”¹¹⁸

Day’s fears were justified, as time would bear out, but it was too late. O’Neill convinced Boulton, if not yet himself, that he’d fallen in love with her. Though he felt anguished through the opening weeks of their relationship by the flux of his “painful ardor” for and “bitterness” toward Bryant, he was honest to Boulton about his feelings; but he also told her he was unsure Bryant would still be in love with him after the excitement of her exploits in wartorn Russia.¹¹⁹

Boulton soon developed misgivings of her own about O’Neill, whose behavior was unaccountably erratic: he had frightening mood swings, made drunken pronouncements of love and hate, and exhibited a paradoxical combination of “contemptuous self-pity” and overweening narcissism. She heard him make “ironic and unkind comments about supposed friends—people to whom he was charming when face to face.” And she realized, as had Beatrice Ashe before her, that he did not like children. “I don’t understand children,” he told her, “they make me uneasy, and I don’t know how to act with them.” Finally, his views on women were problematic, to say the least. Once he remarked to her, “mockingly perhaps,” she admitted, that his ideal woman would be one who performed the composite roles of “mistress, wife, mother, and valet.”120

What outweighed these concerns for Boulton was his stance as an Irish revolutionary. One night at Sheridan Square, for instance, O’Neill spoke of himself as cut from the same cloth as the great Irish martyrs of the Easter Rising of less than two years before—Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, The O’Rahilly—and he assured her that when the revolution came to America at long last, no matter his belief in nonviolent anarchism, he would take up a machine gun alongside his comrades and mow down the establishment forces. He pointed to one of the square’s triangular structures and made an oath that the building would live through the ages as a memorial of American freedom, just as Dublin’s General Post Office would for the Irish.¹²¹

That January 1918, word spread through the Village that Lou Holladay was returning from his trip to Oregon a sober man. On the day of his arrival, Tuesday, January 22, 1918, festivities were set to take place at Christine Ell’s restaurant. His friends all swore to respect his sobriety and not offer him a drink, so O’Neill spent the day at the Hell Hole to get ahead of the drinking curve before reuniting with Holladay. Boulton came in, followed by the painters Charles Demuth and Edward Fisk, and they all walked down the block to Christine’s, where they met up with Dorothy Day and a few others. When Holladay entered, everyone approvingly remarked upon his physical vigor. “I have never seen anyone so at the peak of his life,” Boulton recalled, “so confident and happy. He had conquered. He had come through—and tonight he was going to see his love again and this coming week they were to be married.”122

It was late at the Hell Hole when Holladay’s fiancée, Louise Norton, finally joined the group. The revelers watched uneasily as the two had a tense exchange of words. Then Norton abruptly walked out. She had found someone else in Holladay’s absence. That he’d gone to Oregon to sober up as a condition of their marriage made the betrayal sting all the more, and he headed for the bar.

O’Neill escorted Boulton back to her new apartment on Waverly Place, then returned to the Hell Hole to help console his jilted friend. But O’Neill surprised Boulton by returning much earlier than she’d expected. Without saying a word, he curled up beside her in bed fully clothed and grasped her hand like a child. Dorothy Day came over soon after, looking pale and expressionless. “Louis is dead,” she murmured. “I knew he would die.” She pleaded with O’Neill to return with her to Romany Marie’s restaurant at 133 Washington Place, where Holladay’s corpse still occupied a table. The coroner had arrived, Day told them, and the police were questioning people. According to Boulton, Day then removed a bag of white powder from her coat pocket, the evidence of what had caused Holladay’s heart to fail—heroin. All the while, O’Neill was “fumbling at the edge of horror, refusing to be aware of it.”¹²³

On the way back to the restaurant, O’Neill stopped abruptly at a street corner and said, in a strained tone of defiance, “I’m going back to the Hell Hole. I’ll see you later.” Police officers met Boulton and Day at the entrance to Romany Marie’s but left them alone. There, the two women stared down at Holladay’s propped-up corpse, Boulton remembered, “while a wind from an open window ruffled his hair, and his empty eyes stared into space—those eyes that had been so sure and joyous on his return the afternoon before.”¹²⁴

Dawn was just beginning to break, and no one answered Day’s knock on the door at the Hell Hole, so they retreated to a nearby café. They were soon joined by a friend of Holladay’s and O’Neill’s, probably Robert Allerton Parker, who recounted the events of the early morning. After Louise Norton had left, Holladay had begun buying drinks for the house with money he’d saved for his marriage. Later that night he’d somehow got his hands on a vial or two of heroin, though from whom remained unclear. A “shifty character” at the Hell Hole? A restaurant waiter on Prince Street? Terry Carlin?125 Holladay, Parker, and Charles Demuth got high immediately sniffing it off the back of their hands. (O’Neill, no stranger to altered states of consciousness, always refused hard drugs, the result, no doubt, of growing up the son of an addict.) When the Hell Hole closed, this group and O’Neill went to Romany Marie’s restaurant, where they were joined by Day. Once seated at a table, Holladay “half-smiled” at O’Neill and looked over at Day, as if he thought they might understand, then swallowed a huge dose of the drug straight from the vial. Leaning on Day’s shoulder, he quietly died. Aside from Demuth and the proprietor Romany Marie (Marie Marchand), all the others made themselves scarce, O’Neill included.¹²⁶

Questions remain whether Holladay intended to commit suicide or whether the overdose was accidental (though in 1944 O’Neill told his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, that he believed it was definitely a suicide).¹²⁷ Either way, he’d been drinking alcohol on top of heroin, a lethal combination. When the Hell Hole reopened its doors that morning, Boulton and Day found O’Neill at a table too drunk to speak, with a half-finished pint of Old Taylor bourbon in front of him. As the bar began to fill and excited whispers swirled around Holladay’s death, his sister Polly suddenly appeared in the doorway, “sinister and cold,” Boulton remembered, “and stood staring around in search of something that she did not find, and went out again, without a word, and without even looking at Gene,” one of Holladay’s oldest friends and one of the few witnesses to his death.¹²⁸

After several days of oblivion with Jim at the Garden Hotel, O’Neill returned to Boulton and beseeched her to marry him. She told him they should wait, but O’Neill, determined to quit drinking and find long-term happiness with Boulton, bought them both tickets for Provincetown. Faced with the impending return of her rival, Louise Bryant, Boulton agreed to go. As the Fall River boat pulled away from the pier, O’Neill produced a hidden pint of Old Taylor. Hands shaking uncontrollably, he gulped down a deep swig.129 Holladay’s probable suicide was the first time he’d witnessed a loved one’s death, but the next one, tragically, wasn’t far off.

Louise Bryant returned to New York in early March 1918 and fired off a bruising letter to O’Neill in Provincetown accusing Agnes Boulton, from what she’d heard in the Village, of enabling his alcoholism. She also demanded to know if he still loved her. O’Neill responded that Boulton accepted him “at my worst—and [she] didn’t love me for what she thought I ought to be.” “Whether I love her in a deep sense or not,” he went on, “I do not yet know. For the past half-year ‘love’ has seemed like some word in a foreign language of which I do not know the meaning. It dazes me.” Bryant also accused O’Neill of having “affairs” with Nina Moise and Elaine Freeman. He denied both but called her out on her hypocrisy: “For over a year and a half I loved you. During most of that time you lived with another man. That is undeniable. What does it matter if physically you were faithful to me—especially considering the circumstances.”¹³⁰ O’Neill still regarded his passion for her as straight from Irish legend: “And Ailell said to her: ‘My desire was a desire that was as long as a year; but it was love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.’”¹³¹ “It is more than probable,” he told Bryant in this final letter to her, “that you have burned yourself so deep into my soul that the wound will never heal and I stand condemned to love you forever—and hate you for what you have done to my life.”¹³²

John Francis met O’Neill and Boulton at the Provincetown railroad station and settled them into a temporary studio with a writing loft. When the weather warmed and Francis finished some renovations, they would move into the flat O’Neill and Carlin had occupied the previous summer. “That Gene is a wonderful fellow—a real genius,” Francis told Boulton as he showed her around. “I never seen anybody work like he does—when he’s working.”¹³³

O’Neill took full advantage of their idyllic winter at Francis’s Flats, completing two one-act plays, Shell Shock and The Rope. Shell Shock, alternately titled “Butts,” “A Smoke,” and “At Jesus’s Feet,” was O’Neill’s third attempt to dramatize the horrors of World War I. Whereas his first, The Sniper, takes place in Belgium, with Belgian and Prussian characters, and the second, In the Zone, on a steamship passing through the German U-boat “zone,” Shell Shock is set on the home front, in a student grill at Harvard University. (Unlike the other two plays, Shell Shock was never produced in O’Neill’s lifetime.)

The Rope is a cynical inversion of the biblical tale of the prodigal or “lost” son (Luke 15:11–32). A young man named “Luke” Bentley claims his inheritance before his father’s death and squanders the money. He’s an unrepentant wastrel who unmistakably resembles Jim O’Neill, with his “good-natured, half-foolish grin, his hearty laugh, his curly dark hair, a certain devil-may-care recklessness and irresponsible youth in voice and gesture” (CP1, 556). (In 1909, Jim had played the title character in the popular play The Prodigal Son.)134 Luke is also a stand-in for O’Neill himself: “You country jays oughter wake up and see what’s goin’ on,” Luke tells his brother-in-law. “Look at me. I was green as grass when I left here, but bummin’ round the world, and bein’ in cities, and meetin’ all kinds, and keepin’ your two eyes open—that’s what’ll learn yuh a cute trick or two” (CP2, 561–62). Though O’Neill had lived a dissolute vagabond’s existence, he’d become even more of a prodigal in the theater world. Indeed, if his father James’s plays were meant to offer uplift with redemption and reconciliation, O’Neill’s spiteful Luke never redeems himself. Far from it. Luke’s experiences abroad do little but confirm his contempt for his family and its small-town parochialism.¹³⁵

The Players accepted The Rope for that April, though O’Neill and Nina Moise argued over the script. O’Neill respected Moise’s directing, but she wanted to cut most of the exposition in the first scene, while he insisted that “if the thing is acted naturally all that exposition will come right out of the characters themselves. Make them act!”¹³⁶ Moise capitulated, and the play opened to strong reviews, despite her concerns, on April 26 at the Playwrights’ Theatre.

Toward the end of this same letter to Moise, O’Neill informed her, almost offhandedly, that he’d gotten married two days earlier, April 12, in the “best parlor” of the local parsonage. The clergyman, one Reverend William L. Johnson, was “the most delightful, feeble-minded Godhelpus, mincing Methodist minister that ever prayed through his nose.” “I don’t mean to sneer, really,” he added. “The worthy divine is an utterly lovable old idiot, and the ceremony gained a strange, unique simplicity from his sweet, childlike sincerity. I caught myself wishing I could believe in the same gentle God he seemed so sure of. This seems like sentimentality but it isn’t.”137

After Boulton had agreed to marry him, they’d decided to delay the nuptials until April. They did so for a couple of reasons: she didn’t trust that O’Neill was over Bryant (their sole witness at the ceremony, Alice Woods Ullman, overheard Boulton berate O’Neill, “You still love Louise as much as ever”), and he worried over the “detail and personal exposure that it would put him through.”¹³⁸ One rather alarming “detail” has eluded scholars, personal friends, and family members alike about O’Neill’s marriage to Boulton: either their marriage was legally invalid or, at the very least, O’Neill was in contempt of court. The judge who wrote the interlocutory judgment of O’Neill’s divorce from Kathleen Jenkins, had decreed that O’Neill could not remarry “without the express permission” of the White Plains court, which O’Neill did not receive to marry Boulton. The final judgment on default, filed on October 11, 1912, and only open to the public one hundred years and a day later, gave Jenkins the right to marry again “in like manner as if the defendant [O’Neill] were dead.” But as for O’Neill, the second judge assigned the case had ruled unambiguously that “it shall not be lawful for the defendant to marry any person other than the plaintiff in the lifetime of the plaintiff.”¹³⁹

O’Neill received a copy of this final judgment, but the philosophical anarchist in him evidently chose to ignore it.¹⁴⁰ He didn’t even inform Boulton that he’d been married or had a child until that August. When he broke this news, he claimed that “any consequences such as divorce, money or anything else—I never thought of it. I guess … I just didn’t consider myself a married man. I left everything to Papa. He was grim-lipped and said nothing about anything.” O’Neill’s contravention of the judge’s order aside, Kathleen Jenkins, who at one point admitted she’d been “deeply in love” with him, had little reason to contest her ex-husband’s marriage. She’d married George Pitt-Smith in 1915, and the two were raising Eugene Jr., who was almost eight, in Little Neck, Long Island. They’d even changed the boy’s name to Richard Pitt-Smith. “No,” Jenkins recalled, “we never saw each other again [after O’Neill’s return from Buenos Aires]. Why should we? We were two people ignoring one another’s existence.”141

During the previous summer in Provincetown, 1917, O’Neill chanced upon the title for his first mature full-length play. One evening while he was perched on a dock awaiting the arrival of a local fishing boat, a slow-minded local boy named Howard Slade sat down beside him.¹⁴² “What’s beyond the ocean?” Slade asked. “Europe.” “What’s beyond Europe?” the boy persisted. “The horizon,” O’Neill said. “What’s beyond the horizon?”¹⁴³

O’Neill completed his tragedy Beyond the Horizon in his and Boulton’s studio that spring of 1918 and dedicated it to Boulton. Robert Mayo, the play’s autobiographical protagonist, lives with his parents and older brother Andrew on a New England farm. But Robert dreams of experiencing life “beyond the horizon,” a metaphor he repeatedly invokes. His wanderlust is quashed by the more powerful drive to explore a romantic relationship with a local girl, Ruth Atkins, whom everyone had assumed would marry his more practical brother Andrew, an able farmer. In this way, Robert condemns himself to an ironic fate in that he pursues the life of rural domesticity meant for his brother; and Robert’s decision to marry Ruth and remain on the farm goads Andrew into taking his brother’s place at sea. Andrew’s fate is thus also tragic—by following Robert’s path, he falls into a materialist trap bereft of the spiritual meaning he once knew on the farm. The draw of sex and the power of jealousy impel both brothers to enact a role reversal that ends, fatalistically, in love lost for Ruth (who discovers she loved Andrew after all), the death of their child, Mary, emotional and financial bankruptcy for Andrew, and the release of death for Robert.

O’Neill conceived this plot while recalling a Norwegian sailor from his time aboard the Charles Racine who pined for his family farm and cursed the day he first signed on to a ship (the character Olson in The Long Voyage Home is also based on him). O’Neill sensed that the Norwegian’s complaints were disingenuous, since in his twenty years at sea, he’d not once returned to Norway. O’Neill asked himself, “What if he had stayed on the farm, with his instincts? What would have happened?”144 “But I realized at once he never would have stayed. … And from that point I started to think of a more intellectual, civilized type … a man who would have my Norwegian’s inborn craving for the sea’s unrest, only in him it would be conscious, too conscious, intellectually diluted into a vague, intangible, romantic wanderlust. His powers of resistance, both moral and physical, would also probably be correspondingly watered. He would throw away his instinctive dream and accept the thralldom of the farm for—why, for almost any nice little poetical craving—the romance of sex, say.”¹⁴⁵

Fortuitously, O’Neill sent the script to the well-connected Smart Set editors H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Nathan, the celebrated “father of American drama criticism,” forwarded it on to the powerful Broadway producer John D. Williams. Williams loved it. It was precisely the kind of script he’d been searching for—an authentically American tragedy—and he wrote O’Neill a check to option the play for six months. “I have been trying to get [Joseph] Conrad to do a play for me,” Williams affirmed. “His stories of the sea are so marvelous, but he simply cannot write a play. I wanted something with a feeling of the sea, without the sea scenes. … In Beyond the Horizon the farm is played against the sea, and is the adventuring spirit of the latter. It is the most honest tragedy I have ever seen. … It is utterly devoid of ‘stage English,’ and is the only play by an American author I have ever seen which is.”¹⁴⁶

O’Neill and Boulton were in a festive mood and decided to spend their recent windfall on an informal honeymoon in New York. It was there, with Jim at the Garden Hotel, that Boulton witnessed for the first time the true severity of her husband’s alcohol problem.

O’Neill oversaw rehearsals of The Rope but otherwise avoided the Village “tarantulas.” (Louise Bryant, not incidentally, was sighted at the Hell Hole dressed in a flashy embroidered red jacket and high black boots from Russia demanding to know where he was.) O’Neill was also determined to stay sober: “I will never, or never have written anything good when I am drinking,” he told Boulton, “or even when the miasma of drink is left.” He’d also grown “terrified” about the damage alcohol was inflicting on his brain. A doctor told him that the brain had the texture of raw egg white, and alcohol “toughened” the tissue like it was cooked.147 Nevertheless, if O’Neill wasn’t writing, he was drinking, especially when Jim was around.

From New York, Boulton took the train down to New Jersey, where her family had returned after leaving the farm in Connecticut. Her father needed help with the upkeep of their family home, known to the Boultons as the Old House, where she had grown up, about seventy miles south of the city in West Point Pleasant. When she returned to New York, her husband had finished his work on The Rope with the Provincetown Players and, to her delight, had remained sober. Not wishing to tempt fate, they planned to leave for Provincetown the following day. When the next day came, however, he accepted a drink from Jim, a backslide that began innocently enough with a pull from a bottle of Old Taylor. That pull stranded them in their hotel room for over a week. “What I did not know then,” Boulton said, “was that after one drink the cycle must be fulfilled.”¹⁴⁸

The brothers drank pint after pint of Old Taylor, starting from when they awoke late in the morning to when they passed out in the early hours of the following day. Jim ate his meals at a nearby restaurant, but O’Neill never left his room and survived on soup and brandy-laced milkshakes from the bar downstairs. After a few days, only the milkshakes would stay down. Boulton repeatedly traveled uptown to Grand Central Station to buy tickets back to Massachusetts; and just as repeatedly, O’Neill would wake up, initiate the day’s souse with what he called a “hooker,” or a large shot, emptying whatever was left in the bottle from the previous night. He mulishly ignored her pleas to leave, but eventually she got him onto a train, this time with Jim conspicuously in tow. At the transfer in Boston, Jim wandered off and reappeared with a flea-bitten mongrel he named Bowser, arguing with the conductor until the dog was allowed to travel in the luggage car. For the length of the journey, Jim swayed up and down the corridors obstreperously demanding the company of a “big blonde with bad breath.”149

Upon their return to Provincetown, O’Neill and Boulton moved into O’Neill and Carlin’s old apartment in Francis’s Flats, where the rafters still heralded their mantra from Light on the Path, and Jim was installed in a room down the hall.¹⁵⁰ The Provincetown arts crowd was now in awe of the rising theatrical star. In less than two years’ time, he’d written over twenty plays, eight of which, after The Rope opened that April, had already been produced in New York. The fact that O’Neill rarely appeared at cocktail parties and didn’t join any social clubs only added to his mystique; he’d also developed a reputation for being one of the hardest-working artists in the bohemian beach community, where loafing was the accepted summer pastime. He routinely ended his work day by crossing Commercial Street and spending long hours in deep consultation with Susan Glaspell, exchanging playwriting ideas (a ritual that deeply incensed Boulton).¹⁵¹ Glaspell’s handwritten notes for a talk she’d give later about her time working with O’Neill in Provincetown convey briefly but tellingly O’Neill’s unique style in the years to come: “Hands himself everything—sea—fate—God—murder—suicide—incest—insanity. Always the search for new forms. Because necessary to what he would express.”¹⁵²

O’Neill and his brother’s bender at the Garden Hotel that spring made O’Neill’s first couple of weeks in Provincetown a torturous exercise in self-control; but once he’d succeeded in “tapering off” and shedding the “miasma” of drink altogether, he worked at a feverish pace. He began with a daring one-act called The Dreamy Kid, a dialect play about the early years of black migration and one of his first of several forays into the African American experience. Prior to his and Boulton’s hard-won departure from Manhattan, O’Neill had reunited with a cadre of drinking cronies at the Garden who were unaffected by the venom of the Village gossips. Joe Smith from the Hell Hole was there, and he told O’Neill about a black gangster in New York with the street moniker “Dreamy.” O’Neill spoke the name lovingly. “Dreamy,” he laughed. “A Negro gangster named Dreamy. … Why Dreamy?”153 (The Players rejected The Dreamy Kid for the fall season but would produce it the following year, a white company with an all-black cast, making it yet another first.)

O’Neill had also decided that spring, in his words, to “cut loose from paternal aid,” the $10 a week from his father, “not in anger but in confidence of independence which is liable to prove premature.”¹⁵⁴ This last point was true enough: when Harold de Polo and his wife, Helen, arrived in Provincetown in May, they found that the O’Neills had left for New York. (De Polo later claimed that they’d gone for Boulton to obtain an abortion.)¹⁵⁵ De Polo soon received a wire from Fall River, Massachusetts, begging for $25 for a return ticket to Provincetown, as O’Neill had drunk away their money for the connecting train. De Polo wired the cash, then received another frantic wire from Boulton: Gene was “dying.” De Polo didn’t take this seriously; he knew Boulton wasn’t yet savvy about O’Neill’s drinking habits. But he acknowledged that his friend was “probably a damned sick lad due to his custom of refusing to eat when drinking heavily.”¹⁵⁶

When de Polo embarked on his rescue mission, a lonely stranger took the seat next to him, though the train was nearly empty. He apologized but said he “just had to talk.” This was the writer Sinclair Lewis, then laboring on his breakout novel, Main Street. Lewis joined de Polo when they got off at Fall River, and the two men discovered O’Neill and Boulton at the Hotel Mellen. As de Polo had suspected, O’Neill was “gloriously and happily drunk.” They went out for three more pints of “bottled-in-bond bourbon” and stayed up drinking and talking until five in the morning, de Polo said, “a particularly wonderful time, with great conversation being had by all.”¹⁵⁷ Lewis then spared them the ticket price and drove them back to Provincetown in his car.

“I was at a snooty temperamental stage of souse,” O’Neill told the playwright Sidney Howard years later, “where I’d be damned if I’d descend to travelling on a dirt plebian railroad train.” Lewis, he added, “rescued me from a week’s binge in Fall River … and volunteered to bear the remains to Provincetown.” O’Neill wrote this just prior to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the second American do to so after Lewis himself. When Howard threatened, in fun, to publish this letter, O’Neill replied, “As for your dire threat to ruin Nobel majesty with my letter about Lewis’s rescue work in Fall River, all I can say is, go to it with my grateful blessing! This being Eminent, even if it’s only for a few days, is a most godforsaken pain in the neck.”158

Safely back in Provincetown, O’Neill and Boulton were still tormented by their shortage of funds. They both acknowledged that fiction was the most reliable moneymaker, so de Polo shopped around O’Neill’s story “The Screenews of War,” which he’d written in New London back in 1916, at a couple of “smooth-paper magazines.” “It didn’t, alas, sell,” de Polo admitted, “hanged if I know why.” O’Neill grinned after the second rejection notice and told him, “To hell with it. Throw it away if you want.” (De Polo didn’t share O’Neill’s predilection for destroying literary work, whatever the quality, and “The Screenews of War” was brought to light in 2007.)¹⁵⁹

Boulton, an accomplished fiction writer, was herself struggling over several pieces that summer, including a short story she entitled “The Captain’s Walk”: “Old Captain Curtis … cannot let go, in spite of his age, his uselessness. The sight and sound of the sea awake in him a passionate longing for something more tangible. His lost ship on which his thoughts dwell becomes the symbol of all this. … After prowling for a while through the silent house he always winds up by going up to the walk and keeping watch there for the boat that does not return.” O’Neill read the piece with interest, but bluntly informed her it wasn’t dramatic enough. Boulton explained that she meant it as “a story of atmosphere and obsession,” like The Moon of the Caribbees, but O’Neill co-opted the project and titled it Where the Cross Is Made. In the spirit of exchange, he offered her his full-length satire Now I Ask You to rewrite. “It’s not my sort of stuff,” he said, “but it’s a damn good idea for a popular success.” He suggested she make it a novel or improve the play, but instead she turned her attention to a new story of hers titled “The Letter.”¹⁶⁰

Time and again to clear their heads after a morning’s work, O’Neill and Boulton found themselves rambling on long hikes through the pine forests and sand dunes to Peaked Hill Bar, a converted life-saving station on the peninsula’s northern shore. Locals called the region “the outside,” as Glaspell documented in her play by that title, “an arm that bends to make a harbor—where men are safe … [where] dunes meet woods and woods hold dunes from a town that’s shore to a harbor.” The station had been sold to the financier and art collector Sam Lewisohn by the U.S. Life-Saving Service, and Mabel Dodge supervised its renovation into a picturesque summer bungalow. “This is the house you and I should have!” O’Neill proclaimed to his new wife. “We would live like sea gulls, two sea gulls coming home at night to our home.”161

For their next New York season, 1918–19, the Provincetown Players removed themselves to a larger space at 133 Macdougal Street, an old horse and carriage stable called Claflin’s three doors down from the Playwrights’ Theatre. Once again, they were hard up for cash; but a theater “angel,” Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes (best known for popularizing Argyrol, a treatment for gonorrhea), offered the Players $1,000 to renovate the building if they could raise enough to match the gift. They did so, thanks to their new secretary M. [Mary] Eleanor Fitzgerald, known as “Fitzie,” a political activist associated with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman who had an unparalleled flair for down-to-the-last-minute fund-raising. The Players now had a box office and dressing rooms in the basement, and the house seated nearly 200, up from 150. Christine Ell’s restaurant went with them, though the odor of cooking from the second floor intermingled, audience members complained, with the former stable’s “faint, pungent aroma of horses and manure.”¹⁶²

Jack Reed’s passion for the theater of dissent never subsided while he covered the Russian Revolution. Just after his return, he regaled his friends at the Harvard Club with tales of the political theater he’d attended: “You know, right behind the lines, they’re doing a production of Hamlet—and you ought to see it, it’s the greatest production of Hamlet I’ve ever seen. And it’s announced as Hamlet: A Study in Danish Imperialism!”163 Reed insisted that the Players keep an old cross tie ring screwed firmly into the auditorium’s right wall. This would remind them, he said, of their populist roots. About the ring, one of the Players’ designers, Donald Corley, painted in striking letters a rousing motto for their new playhouse: “Here Pegasus was Hitched.”¹⁶⁴

The meaning and provenance of that inscription has remained a mystery over the years. But a lighthearted exposé penned by the illustrator and hack writer W. Livingston Larned had circulated in the popular theater tabloid, the New York Review, just after the Players had transferred to Greenwich Village in November 1916. In this droll account, “Below Washington Square,” Larned pokes fun at the epidemic of idleness among the Village’s bohemian crowd:

It goes with poetry and sich,

  To loaf around the flowing bowl;

A genius, somehow, hates to hitch

  Pegasus up—th’ lazy soul.

Bring on another jug of wine;

  Th’ garlic’s running fine, tonight.

“Say … read this little jig of mine;

  And … won’t you buy a chap a bite?”

(Larned credited these lines to A Merchant of Venice, act 4, scene 3. There is no act 4, scene 3 in Shakespeare’s play.) “Look ’em over,” Larned said of the Village gadabouts, “these young folks, sooner or later, awake to the wastefulness of their funny Bohemia and climb out and up to safety. While they’re wading around in the dregs, however, they’re interesting.”¹⁶⁵

The Players debunked such stereotypes by hitching Pegasus up at 133 Macdougal with unbounded creative energy and personal sacrifice. Once the proper permits had been acquired from the Tenement House and Building Department, the Players—galvanized by Jig Cook, who slept on the stage after working hours—constructed an inclined auditorium floor to maximize the audience’s view and fashioned comfortable seating with padded cushions and backs. They painted the walls a “rich tawny orange,” the ceilings a “deep blue,” and the proscenium a “dark smoke gray.” Houselights and a control board were installed, and the new curtain opened and closed with silky effortlessness. Lacking the advantage of fly lofts above the stage, brawny stagehands would extract and replace the sets, without pulleys, through a slot in the floor that led to their basement set-construction shop. Although the name wouldn’t be official for a couple of years, Cook began “The Provincetown Players Fund,” and they hung a painted shingle out front that read simply, “Provincetown Playhouse.” 166

The Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street, New York City.

(PHOTO BY BERENICE ABBOT. © BERENICE ABBOTT/COMMERCE GRAPHICS)

“The Town Is Yours”

The Players celebrated O’Neill’s return to New York with a homecoming party and embraced Boulton as one of their own. After that, O’Neill and Boulton went to a restaurant with actor Teddy Ballantine and his wife, Stella, O’Neill’s friend Saxe Commins’s sister. O’Neill’s thirst for liquor was particularly overpowering. His mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer that fall, which resulted in a successful, if terrifying, mastectomy procedure (and a brief relapse of her drug addiction). O’Neill knew that if he wanted not to get too “tight,” he should drink whiskey with a lot of water. He did so and tolerated the teasing good-humoredly; but a whiskey bottle was inevitably passed around, and O’Neill helped himself to a straight drink. Spotting this, Boulton whispered that maybe they should leave. He pushed her backward and then, “his mouth distorted with an ironic grin,” slapped her hard across the face with the back of his hand. Boulton, in a state of shock, was hastily led out by Stella Ballantine. “It means nothing, my dear, nothing!” Stella tried to reassure her. “Genius is like that, my dear! Genius must have its outlet!” Late that night, Boulton said, O’Neill pitifully returned to his wife, “a sick man.”167

Jimmy Light, who was cast as the captain’s son in the upcoming production of Where the Cross Is Made, showed up at O’Neill’s hotel a few days later. O’Neill had avoided Macdougal Street after his loutish behavior, but his presence was required at the dress rehearsal. Among the actors, according to Edna Kenton, the play had given rise to “one prolonged argument, to give it no more brutal name.”¹⁶⁸ Hutch Collins, playing the psychotic captain, and Ida Rauh, who both directed and played the female lead, tried to convince O’Neill that a group of ghosts he called for in the final scene should be imagined rather than played by actors. Ghosts, they argued, do not tread their feet on floorboards, and the audience might find such an incongruity more hilarious than terrifying. The Players were reluctant to take such a gamble, particularly on the opening night of the season.

What was left unspoken was their mutual fear of a new adversary—the critic. Although they retained their policy of making critics pay for their own tickets, opening night at the new theater was sure to attract a fair number of scoop mongers willing to pay out of pocket. “We begged Gene, as if it were a favor to the dying, to cut the ghosts,” Kenton recalled.¹⁶⁹ “No,” he said after watching the scene rehearsed. “They’re rotten, but they won’t be so bad tomorrow night, beyond the first twenty rows anyway. This play presumes that everybody is mad but the girl, that everybody sees the ghosts but the girl. Everybody but the girl means everybody in this house but the girl. I want to see whether it’s possible to make an audience go mad too.”170

O’Neill was right: when the houselights went green and the ghosts appeared, Heywood Broun, writing for the New York Tribune and one of the few willing to pay the ticket price, had been seated too close to appreciate the “visual illusion,” he said, “but the sweep of the story and the exceptional skill with which the scene of the delusion is written made us distinctly fearful of the silent dead men who walked across the stage.”¹⁷¹ In spite of the play’s relative success, O’Neill had never taken it seriously. “It was great fun to write,” he said, “theatrically very thrilling, an amusing experiment in treating the audience as insane—that is all it means or ever meant to me.”¹⁷²

Conversely, on December 20, the Players staged for their second bill a play O’Neill took very seriously indeed: The Moon of the Caribbees. Set on the forward deck of the fictional Glencairn at anchor off Port of Spain, Trinidad, The Moon of the Caribbees features a mélange of over twenty seamen drinking rum, brawling, and whoring; the men cavort with West Indian “bumboat” women as Old Tom, the “Donkeyman” (or engineer), looks on in tolerant amusement and listens patiently as Smitty, based on O’Neill’s actual Buenos Aires acquaintance, recounts memories of his lost love back home. The West Indian dirge ethereally drifting over the gunnels from the island was performed by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her two sisters, and their mother.¹⁷³ “It was a mood play, and the Millay family provided the background music, which set the mood,” Jimmy Light’s wife, Susan Jenkins Brown, remembered. “It was all swooping vocal harmonies—they weren’t seen, and … well, it was unearthly.”¹⁷⁴

O’Neill avowed that The Moon of the Caribbees signaled his most conscious revolt against the “conventional construction of the theatre as it is.” Indeed, one of the two mystified critics in attendance considered the “mood play” “just an interlude of a drama, with prelude and afterlude left to the imagination of the spectators.” O’Neill ignored such gainsayers and in hindsight contended with immense satisfaction that The Moon “was my first real break with theatrical traditions. Once I had taken this initial step the other plays followed logically.”175

On the night before Where the Cross Is Made had opened, O’Neill and Boulton fled to her ancestral home, the Old House, in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Life there proved as rustic and uneventful as O’Neill could have hoped for; and he remained mostly sober, aside from the occasional drunken excursion to monitor the Players’ progress with The Moon of the Caribbees. He and Boulton were amused to discover that a rumor had spread around town that O’Neill was a drug addict. “Doesn’t your husband take drugs?” a wary local woman asked. “Those walks—those long walks! It ain’t natural, a man walking like that. … I’ve passed him looking so quiet, you could tell he wasn’t drinking, so I calculated he must have been taking drugs.”¹⁷⁶

Boulton’s family had moved back to West Point Pleasant from Connecticut, but O’Neill and Boulton had the place to themselves. Prior to their arrival, Boulton’s father Teddy, an accomplished artist himself, had amiably agreed to remove the family so his son-in-law could work in peace. Over the bitterly cold winter months at the Old House, O’Neill completed two plays he’d sketched out in Provincetown the summer before: The Straw, about his convalescence at Gaylord Farm, and Chris Christophersen, about his friend of that name from Jimmy the Priest’s. He checked the mail obsessively, but still no word arrived from John Williams about a production schedule for Beyond the Horizon, and Williams’s frustrating reticence spurred O’Neill to hire his first (and lifelong) agent, Richard J. Madden of the American Play Company.

Boulton visited her daughter at her family’s provisional house nearby, but “only for a few minutes,” she recalled. “Cookie,” as Barbara was nicknamed, “appeared astonished and detached” when she received a hug, but was “mildly pleased” by her present of a glass angel figure adorned with a bouquet of flowers.¹⁷⁷ Boulton didn’t tell O’Neill about the visit, or even that her family was in the vicinity; but he found out from neighbors. “What’s the idea of not telling me your family was here?” he demanded.178 But she knew her husband well enough—the first time her sisters Margery and Barbara visited the Old House, he hid in a closet. Eventually, though, he found the Boultons enjoyable company, particularly her free-thinking grandmother and Teddy, who’d been friends with Algernon Swinburne, one of O’Neill’s favorite poets.¹⁷⁹ The sentiment proved mutual, which was fortunate, given that Boulton would discover that winter that she was pregnant.

Back in Provincetown in May 1919, rather than moving back into Francis’s Flats as usual, O’Neill and Boulton moved into a home of their own—Peaked Hill Bar, the renovated life-saving station nestled among the dunes on the uninhabited, weather-exposed northern shore. Ella O’Neill, though she’d frowned upon her son’s marriage to “the Irish servant girl,” had persuaded James to purchase them this spectacular, if belated, wedding present on Provincetown’s “outside.”¹⁸⁰

“Peaked Hill Bar.” The name alone brought to mind the sea in all its romance, danger and, for O’Neill, solace. “The Atlantic for a front lawn, miles of sand dunes for a back yard,” he rhapsodized. “No need to wear clothes—no vestige of the unrefined refinements of civilization.” The wooden rafters were strung with wire to prevent high winds from blowing the roof into the sea, and Mabel Dodge had modernized the kitchen with state-of-the-art appliances; enlisting expert aid from the artist Maurice Sterne and set designer Robert Edmond Jones, she’d also “fitted it up inside” with coat upon coat of white and blue paint, giving the light-drenched interior a celestial ambiance. Stepping into the house from the beach, the effect was that one hadn’t left the outside, but rather that the rooms had been merged with the sand and sky and ocean.¹⁸¹

O’Neill had a knack for outlining his sets for designers in his stage directions and often sketched out his own designs; in a 1921 interview, he described the interior of his breathtaking new estate as if composing a new play: “The interiors of the buildings … still preserve their old sea flavor. The stairs are like companionways of a ship. There are lockers everywhere. An immense open fireplace. The big boat room, now our living room, still has the steel fixtures in the ceiling from which one of the boats was slung. The lookout station on the roof is the same as when the coast guards spent their eternal two-hour vigils there. The exteriors of the buildings are as weather-beaten as the bulwarks of a derelict. The glass in the windows is ground frosty by the flying sands of the winter storms. … The place has come to mean a tremendous lot to me. I feel a true kinship and harmony with life out there.”182

O’Neill’s writing studio was set up on the second floor, where the sand-scraped windows overlooked the North Atlantic. The room was fitted with a captain’s chair and a desk constructed from driftwood; and he adorned his walls, like his room at Princeton (if without the women’s undergarments and used condoms), with fishing nets and old floats. When O’Neill was struggling over a difficult bit of dialogue, he’d step onto the look-out platform and, in blissful solitude, take in his private view of the open sea. Other than the odd fishing or life-saving boat, no sign of civilization disrupted the panoramic coastal scenery for miles in any direction.

Most of his first summer there was spent revising Chris Christophersen while awaiting the birth of his and Boulton’s first child. The actual Christopherson from Jimmy the Priest’s, like his fictional counterpart, inveighed repeatedly against “dat ole davil, sea.”¹⁸³ “When I knew him,” O’Neill told a reporter, “he was on the beach, a real down-and-outer. He wouldn’t ship out, although it was the only work he knew, and he spent his time getting drunk and cursing the sea. ‘Dat ole davil,’ he called it. Finally he got a job as captain of a coal barge.” O’Neill reported that in 1917, Christopherson “got terribly drunk down at Jimmy’s … and reeled off at about two o’clock in the morning for his barge. On Christmas morning he was found in the river, frozen to death.”¹⁸⁴ In fact, the old barge skipper had accidentally fallen into New York Harbor on October 15, 1917, and his remains were found a week later floating off Liberty Island.¹⁸⁵

Peaked Hill Bar in Provincetown.

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

O’Neill wrote each morning after breakfast and ended his workday around one o’clock with a sandwich and a nap. In the afternoons he took long swims, sunbathed nude among the dunes, or strolled along the coastline with Boulton. Together they broke up flocks of sandpipers that gathered at the water’s edge and analyzed horseshoe crabs; for exercise, especially if it rained, O’Neill pounded away at a punching bag he’d installed in the back room. Most evenings he read in his white Morris chair until eleven or so, then went to bed at midnight. “Gene was beautiful that summer,” Boulton recalled, “tall and brown and tender and smiling, working all morning, lying for hours in the sun, absorbing life and courage and hope from the sea.”186

Over time, however, Peaked Hill Bar’s remoteness proved as much a curse as a blessing. O’Neill and Boulton’s volatile personalities had steadily begun to chafe against each other. Any trip to town required an onerous slog across dunes and pine forests, and socializing was reserved for summer guests who braved the three-mile tramp out. No road led to the site, and their mail and supplies had to be delivered by horse-drawn carts. They rarely went into town more than once a week, where they would visit with Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook, Mary Vorse, Hutch Hapgood and Neith Boyce, and Teddy and Stella Ballantine, among others on the East End.

That September, they rented a small cottage called Happy Home behind Cook and Glaspell’s house on Commercial Street so Boulton would be closer to their doctor and supplies for the baby, who was due in October. Boulton’s mother and nineteen-year-old sister Margery came to stay with her as the birth approached. On September 10, Boulton and her family bunked with the Ballantines while Happy Home was prepped and sterilized. O’Neill worked at Peaked Hill Bar but made frequent trips to town. He was surprised to discover, given his lifelong aversion to children, that he looked forward to the child’s arrival. As the due date loomed closer, he rented another cottage across from Happy Home. It was there that he wrote his one-act Exorcism, the narrative of his suicide attempt that ends on an exultant note of rebirth, while the actual birth of his son was about to take place a stone’s throw away.¹⁸⁷ He gave the corrected typescript to Boulton, either for her to type up a clean script for the Players or as a present—probably both. (O’Neill’s motivation for treating his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, so shabbily in the play might be in part explained by Boulton’s ardent jealousy.) “[God] evidently wants to retain my services here below,” Ned/O’Neill says after surviving the attempt on his life, “for what I don’t know yet but I’m going to find out—and I feel of use already!”188

O’Neill stood at Boulton’s bedside as Shane Rudraighe O’Neill was born on October 30. He was named for the sixteenth-century Irish chieftain Séan an Díomais Ó Néill, known to the ages as “Shane the Proud.” “Shane the Loud!” O’Neill chuckled, gazing down at the howling newborn. “It’ll be us still from now on,” he said. “Us—alone—but the three of us. … A sort of Holy Trinity, eh, Shane?” Ella O’Neill, the elated new grandmother, wrote a warm (if backhandedly malicious) congratulatory note to her son: “I am one of the happiest old ladies in New York tonight to know I have such a wonderful grandson but no more wonderful than you were when you were born and weighed eleven pounds and no nerves at that time. I am enclosing a picture of you taken at three months. Hope your boy will be as good looking.”¹⁸⁹

The Dreamy Kid premiered at Macdougal Street the day after Shane’s birth. Jig Cook had taken a leave of absence to write his full-length play The Spring in Provincetown, and Jimmy Light took the helm of the Provincetown Playhouse. Under his directorship, the Players doubled down on their revolutionary methods by flouting the long-standing tradition of white companies using white actors in blackface and instead hired an all-black cast. O’Neill’s future associate and close friend Kenneth Macgowan, though he was a stranger at the time, raved that The Dreamy Kid was “short, sharp, and incisive. Its people live. Its story moves. It is full of ‘punch.’”¹⁹⁰

During his last month in Provincetown, before returning to New York, O’Neill preoccupied himself, along with fathering his newborn, with trying to sell The Straw either to the Washington Square Players, who’d recently renamed themselves the Theatre Guild, or to George C. Tyler, once his father’s advance man from the old days of Monte Cristo but now a major Broadway producer. O’Neill admitted to Tyler, who did eventually buy it, that he was “in the devil of a hurry … because it is my pet play and I am anxious to hug to my heart the certainty that it is going to be done.”¹⁹¹

For $6 a week, the O’Neills hired the French-born widow of a Provincetown sea captain named Fifine Clark (soon nicknamed “Gaga”) as a nanny for Shane and general “dame of all work.”192 Once Boulton was settled, with Terry Carlin left behind to sponge from her in the name of domestic assistance, O’Neill hopped the train to New York with Jig Cook and Hutch Hapgood. The tasks at hand were threefold: he would find a producer for The Straw, get straight answers from George Tyler about Chris Christophersen, and ascertain at long last John Williams’s plans for Beyond the Horizon.

O’Neill resolved to steer clear of the Macdougal Street crowd while in New York and took a room down the hall from his parents at the Prince George Hotel. But the reunion was less than cheerful: his father had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer, he reported back, “so serious that Mama was going to summon the priest and wire for Jim and me at one time.”¹⁹³ Instead of a priest, they summoned Dr. John Aspell, the oncologist who’d performed Ella’s mastectomy in 1918. Dr. Aspell stabilized him for the time being, but the prognosis was not good.

O’Neill got down to business nevertheless; now armed with an agent, Richard Madden, he felt that he’d reached a level of professionalism requiring a semblance of decorum. So he went shopping with his mother at Lord & Taylor’s for more reputable attire for his meetings with Tyler and Williams. The meetings went well. Tyler bought Chris Christophersen, shortened to Chris, and Williams assured O’Neill that Beyond the Horizon was slotted for February. He’d also made another important connection the previous spring, one that would result in one of his closest friendships and gain him a powerful defender for the remainder of his career—Smart Set editor and drama critic George Jean Nathan. O’Neill and Nathan were a perfect fit, both professionally and personally, and at the time of their second meeting, at the Royalton Hotel, Nathan was “gratified” to find O’Neill “as proficient at drinking cocktails as at concocting dramas.”¹⁹⁴

By the late fall of 1919, though, the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act had made liquor a frustratingly scarce commodity in New York. “Believe me,” O’Neill complained to Boulton, “Prohibition is very much of a fact.” Even the Garden Hotel was “dry as dry.”195 At Jimmy the Priest’s, James Condon’s tolerance for drunkenness at all costs had gotten the better of him: on December 27, 1919, just a few weeks before Prohibition began that January 1920, Condon, then fifty-five, was forced to shut down the bar after four men died while drinking there. One was found dead in the back room, another upstairs in his bed; and two more, one of whom was found on the street outside in a coma, were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where they couldn’t be helped. When the conscious man admitted that he’d been drinking at “Jimmy’s Place” before he died, Condon and his bartender William Nolan were arrested for homicide. They were charged with allegedly serving “coroner’s cocktails,” a wood alcohol moonshine responsible for scores of deaths on the East Coast (and one of Terry Carlin’s favorite beverages through Prohibition).¹⁹⁶ Condon and Nolan were taken to Manhattan’s notorious Tombs prison; though they were each released on $1,000 bail after a few days, Jimmy’s Hotel and Café was to be shut down for good. (In 1966, the neighborhood would be razed to make way for the World Trade Center.)

At the same time, the Provincetown Players had begun hosting “John Barleycorn parties,” which O’Neill attended for the drinks if not the company. Boulton wrote to express her disapproval over his getting drunk with the Players: “The whole crowd is more or less envious and only too glad to drag you down somehow into the dirt. … You know, as well as I do, the shape you get into after much drinking! … You should have had guts enough not to go, at this time when so very much hangs in the balance.” “No more lecture letters, please!” he retorted. “You never used to be a moralist, and I’ve never in my life stood for that stuff, even from my Mother.”¹⁹⁷

Far more satisfying was a night at the Hell Hole when Tom Wallace, Lefty Louie, Joe Smith, and a few prostitutes hanging around got O’Neill loaded on sherry; even without hard liquor it was a gretime, free of the suffocating Village crowd. Louie was delighted that his song “My Josephine,” which he’d long ago concocted for a “tough Wop cabaret,” would be featured in Chris. “This little incident of the song seems to me quite touching in a way,” O’Neill wrote Boulton recounting the edifying night with his old friends, “and I think all the hours seemingly wasted in the H.H. [Hell Hole] would be justified if they had resulted in only this.”198 (Louie’s song would be made far more popular by O’Neill’s revision of Chris, “Anna Christie.”)

O’Neill’s otherwise bad fortune tracking down hooch in “Dry New York” took another turn after meeting Richard Bennett, the future star and unofficial director of Beyond the Horizon. The two met at John Williams’s office, then retired to Bennett’s Greenwich Village apartment. Bennett’s wife prepared them a dinner of scrambled eggs, then went off to bed, at which point Bennett asked the playwright, “Do you like absinthe?” “Yes,” he replied, putting aside his disastrous initiation to the “green fairies” at Princeton with Lou Holladay, “but what good does a liking do me?” Bennett announced that he had fifty cases of the hallucinogenic liquor. “I knew I was going to like you from the first moment we met,” O’Neill said, and they drank absinthe until seven thirty in the morning while reading the script together line by line.

Back at his hotel room, O’Neill, still affected by “the subtle fireworks from the queer poison of absinthe,” wrote a prose poem while “the whole world was shot through with White Logic.”¹⁹⁹ (“White Logic” was Jack London’s term for the existential angst that drunkenness incurs while paradoxically also making it endurable.) O’Neill’s prose poem testifies to what happens to a mind affected by absinthe: “The golden oranges in the patio dream of the Hesperides. The earth is a sun-struck bee, its wings sodden with golden pollen, sifted dust of sunbeams. … Green parrots in the green of the orange trees gossiping like deaf people—a discord rasps saw-teeth in the keen blue blade of silence,” and so forth. But it eventually concludes with a passionate cry of eternal devotion to Boulton in life and in death.²⁰⁰

Meanwhile, over the holiday season of 1919–20, the worldwide flu epidemic was claiming thousands of lives and New York residents were brought low for months by one of the worst blizzard seasons in the city’s history. Tempers had also begun to flare at rehearsals for Beyond the Horizon. At one point Bennett and O’Neill “went to the mat,” Bennett said, over the climactic scene in which Robert calls Ruth a “slut.” When Robert finds out that Ruth loves his brother, he responds as O’Neill might have when Bryant broke with him in favor of Reed: “God! It wasn’t that I haven’t guessed how mean and small you are—but I’ve kept on telling myself that I must be wrong—like a fool!—like a damned fool! … You—you slut!” (CP1, 616). John Williams didn’t like the use of the word either. O’Neill refused to back down, even face-to-face with such intimidating professionals. (He was invariably drunk during Macdougal Street rehearsals, but not for these.) “Will you be responsible for the failure of this scene if we play it your way?” Bennett asked O’Neill. The dramatist replied in the affirmative. Bennett finished the scene, then shouted, “By God, you’re right! Let’s have a few more fights and this play’ll pick up 100%.”201

Such on-the-job anxiety, vitriolic letters from home, and his father’s declining health triggered a paralyzing insomnia, and O’Neill barely made it to rehearsals. At one point he felt compelled to take the sleep aid veronal, the drug he’d used in his suicide attempt. Above all, he feared low attendance at Beyond the Horizon, insisting that Cook and Glaspell release the Players’ subscription list in order to “paper” the house with respectable numbers. Glaspell was agitated by the request and chastised Boulton that lists were “sacred things—secret things.” “Jig feels as I do,” she said. “Gene should have use of the list, but it should not be let out of the office.”²⁰²

But in spite of the feuds and hangovers, his father’s cancer, and the blizzards, his flu, and the insomnia that plagued him through the season, working on Broadway afforded a priceless education for the budding playwright. “I’ve learned a tremendous lot that I wouldn’t miss for worlds,” he told Boulton, “knowledge that will be of real worth hereafter. … This whole experience has been invaluable to me as an artist who ought to know his medium from top to bottom.”²⁰³

Beyond the Horizon’s world premiere, and thus O’Neill’s debut as a commercially viable playwright, took place on the afternoon of February 2, 1920, just north of the Bronx at the Warburton Theatre in Yonkers, New York. This trial performance at the Warburton, a small-time venue that lived up to its self-styled repute as “The Theatre of Constant Surprises” by hosting the first full-length Eugene O’Neill play ever to appear onstage, was a bargain at 50¢ a seat. O’Neill, distressed by several days of poor rehearsals, excused himself from attending, using his incipient flu symptoms as a weak pretext. O’Neill may have had his doubts, but the local Yonkers Statesman reviewed the matinee enthusiastically, if briefly, reporting that “the audience, although not large, was a representative one and liberal with applause.”204

O’Neill’s Broadway debut took place the following afternoon, February 3, at the Morosco Theatre. James and Ella reserved box seats, while O’Neill was dismayed to find himself seated next to his producer John Williams. He squirmed through all three acts, disgusted with the play and with what he believed, wrongly it would turn out, was a distinct lack of emotional response from the audience. “I suffered tortures,” he wrote Boulton. “I went out convinced that Beyond was a flivver artistically and every other way.” His father wept openly through the performance, though tempered his judgment after the show. “It’s all right, if that’s what you want to do,” he told his son outside on the street, “but people come to the theater to forget their troubles, not to be reminded of them. What are you trying to do—send them home to commit suicide?”²⁰⁵

That night, O’Neill received a congratulatory wire from Boulton at the theater: “Three cheers for you and Beyond and much love, Agnes.” Otherwise, isolated on the Cape, she was in no mood to commiserate over his disappointing evening. Earlier that day, she’d written him, “Frankly—you don’t mind my being frank, do you?—it is hell for me that you are not coming—that you are not here now.” Another letter written the same day describes her failed attempt to rein in her fury in his upstairs office: “There I was, staring at the silly, stupid wall paper, and two hundred miles away, Beyond was having its premiere. Well—if a year ago, when we were down in Pt. P. [Point Pleasant] someone had told me I’d be in that room—in Provincetown—alone—and you and Beyond in N.Y.—I suppose I should have rebelled! Certainly, I’d never have believed it—I’d have said—‘I’ll get there somehow’!” “What is the matter?” she persisted over his lackluster responses to her earlier love letters. “Has Louise [Bryant] been writing you—congratulations?”²⁰⁶ Miserable throughout O’Neill’s absence that winter, having been left alone with Shane, Gaga, and Terry Carlin, she still managed to revise Now I Ask You and complete two short stories, “The Hater of Mediocrity” and “The Snob,” both of which would be accepted at the Smart Set.

Back at the Prince George after the opening, O’Neill collapsed into bed, too dejected to write Boulton. Then, the next morning, the papers arrived. “Lo and behold, in spite of all the handicaps of a rotten first performance, Beyond had won,” he wrote her. “You never saw such notices!” The New York Times hailed it as “an absorbing, significant, and memorable tragedy, so full of meat that it makes most of the remaining fare seem like the merest meringue.” Those left behind in Provincetown received an exultant telegram from Jimmy Light: “Just saw Gene’s play, a great great play. I am wildly excited, dawn of a new day. Superb acting audience enthusiastic, hurrah … !” The only sustained criticism by seasoned theatergoers was over the play’s alternating scene changes from interior to exterior, which many considered amateurish and distracting. O’Neill fumed to Barrett Clark over the critics’ accusations that the playwright showed “ignorance of conventional every day technique—I, a Baker 47 alumnus!” (Baker had in fact read Beyond the Horizon, he said, and was “delighted with and proud of it.”)207 Such relatively minor complaints aside, few critics failed to point out the great promise of this young dramatist.

“I felt sure when I saw the woebegone faces of the audience on the opening day that it was a rank failure,” O’Neill told a reporter, “and no one was more surprised than was I when I saw the morning papers and came to the conclusion that the sad expressions on the playgoers’ faces were caused by their feeling the tragedy I had written.” That July 1920, George Jean Nathan described O’Neill in a Smart Set article entitled “The American Playwright” as “the one writer for the native stage who gives promise of achieving a sound position for himself.” After expressing his heartfelt gratitude, O’Neill agreed with Nathan’s estimation that he was still wet behind the ears: “God stiffen it, I am young yet and I mean to grow! And in this faith I live: That if I have the ‘guts’ to ignore the megaphone men and what goes with them, to follow the dream and live for that alone, then my real significant bit of truth and the ability to express it, will be conquered in time—not tomorrow nor the next day nor any near, easily-attained period but after the struggle has been long enough and hard enough to merit victory.”208

Boulton was openly envious of her husband’s New York adventure and the great triumphs celebrated in her absence. She’d begun to feel abandoned sexually too. “Gene—your little Miss P[ussy] is meowing, and howling and behaving like a perfect devil,” she said. (O’Neill and Boulton referred to his penis, incidentally, as “The Nightingale,” a sobriquet they’d appropriated from Boccaccio’s Decameron.) During the week that followed opening night, they exchanged a burst of acrimonious letters, which only intensified in rancor over those collectively wretched February days. Her mood grew increasingly gloomy, while his more obstinate and defiant. “Your letter was gall when I prayed for wine,” he wrote. If the bickering didn’t stop, he warned, “my only remaining hope is that the ‘Flu,’ or some other material cause, will speedily save me the decision which would inevitably have to come at my own instance. If you and I are but another dream that passes, then I desire nothing further from the Great Sickness but release.”²⁰⁹

John Williams at first restricted Beyond the Horizon’s run to “special matinees,” given the blizzards and the flu epidemic, which made even the most devoted theatergoers wary of an auditorium’s congested air. But once the reviews arrived, Williams deftly transferred the production to the Criterion Theatre, then arranged for a standard engagement at the Little Theatre. Williams had tried to persuade either Jack or Lee Shubert to take it on; but whichever of the two theatrical power brokers it was, he jerked his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and barked, “Nothin’ doin! It’s got great notices but nix on the tragedy stuff until you show us the old box-office returns.” After 111 performances, the play wound up generating a small fortune in returns: $117,071. “I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know,” O’Neill wrote Nina Moise, “that I am not compromising but ‘hewing to the line,’ and not trying to get too wealthy although, as you can imagine, the opportunities to sell myself have not been lacking of late.”²¹⁰

By the spring of 1920, when O’Neill was only thirty-one, his name had appeared in every major newspaper from Boston to Philadelphia. The conservative Irish dramatist and critic St. John Ervine wrote O’Neill that Beyond the Horizon was the first play he’d attended in America, and that he was “proud to think that so beautiful a thing was made by a man with Irish blood.”211 Theatre Magazine profiled O’Neill that April, noting that he even looked the part of the “literary genius.” When the reporter, Alta M. Coleman, said good-bye after their interview, she admitted her worry about feeling disappointed with him after seeing his plays. “But I’m not!” she said. “They’re all there—in your eyes.” “So be prepared to read of my ‘great sad eyes,’” he wrote Boulton after Coleman left him “to cough in peace.”²¹² Sure enough: “Though not striking in appearance,” Coleman wrote, “Eugene O’Neill is not the usual type. Lack of robustness gives his five-feet ten inches added heighth [O’Neill was five feet eleven]; his clothes, which hang loosely upon his well-proportioned frame, suggest neither dapperness nor the conscious carelessness of the artist. Hands well-manicured and white from a winter indoors; but his face retains a tinge of summer tan. His forehead high and rounded calls to mind pictures of Edgar Allan Poe; it narrows at the temples where his crisp black hair is tinged with white. … Chin and nose are well defined though not aggressive; a narrow black moustache marks his upper lip but cannot hide the extreme sensitiveness of his mouth—a sensitiveness that is intensified in his large brilliant eyes, the whites of an opaque clearness contrasting with the rich glowing brown of the iris. These eyes have seen both the sunshine and suffering of the world—they say ‘Life is a tragedy—hurrah!’”²¹³

O’Neill’s slow-budding flu symptoms blossomed to full strength after the premiere; what he glimpsed in the mirror looked like a corpse “dug out of the grave by mistake.” His temperature hovered just over a hundred degrees for a full week, and his weight dropped to about 125 pounds. “Stripped, I look like a medical student’s chart, every muscle outlined and every bone and bit of sinew.” Boulton warned him to avoid the infected trains, whose close quarters were known to spread the disease, and be careful in the blizzard—there had been many cases, she reminded him, of the effects of freezing weather lethally compounding flu with pneumonia. Much worse than O’Neill’s flu was that his father James, already wasting away from intestinal cancer, had just suffered a stroke. “Papa, it seems, is doomed,” O’Neill told Boulton. “To have this happen just at the time when the Old Man and I were getting to be such good pals! … I’m all broken up and begin to cry every time the meaning of it all dawns on me.”214

Far and away the most significant result of this rapprochement for O’Neill was James’s heartfelt confession to his son about the play that had made his fortune and reputation. Monte Cristo, James intoned repeatedly, had been his “curse,” O’Neill wrote of their conversation: “He had fallen for the lure of easy popularity and easy money.” James believed that overall, with his neglected potential and failed investments, “he had made a bad bargain. The money was thrown away, squandered in wild speculations, lost. … The treasures of Monte Cristo are buried deep again—in prairie dog gold mines, in unlubricated wells, in fuelless coal lands—the modern Castles in Spain of pure romance.” “How keenly he felt this in the last years,” O’Neill told George Tyler, “I think I am the only one who knows, the only one he confided in.”²¹⁵ Before this, of course, James had made this confession to a great many people over his career, including to the tabloid press. But for his son it was a revelation. James’s anguish over his choice inspired O’Neill to write a profoundly illuminating monologue in Long Day’s Journey Into Night wherein James Tyrone divulges his self-loathing to his son Edmund: “I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense. That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune” (CP3, 809). “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder,” James asks in somber reflection, “that was worth—” (CP3, 810).

George Tyler’s production of Chris was scheduled to open on March 8 at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City, but O’Neill decided to return to his wife and son in Provincetown a few days earlier. Tyler pleaded with O’Neill to come back to New York and help him at the rehearsals, but was flatly refused. Chris opened to a horde of “tango lovers and chewing gum sweethearts,” O’Neill griped after reading the bad reviews, and it then moved to Philadelphia, where its equally lukewarm reception squelched any hopes for a New York run. O’Neill wasn’t in the least surprised; he recognized that “the last scene is weak and that the love affair in the play is piffling and undramatic.” He accepted most of the responsibility and informed Tyler that he’d “write a completely new script” and advised him to “throw the present play in the ashbarrel.”216

O’Neill had delivered his one-act Exorcism to the Players the previous December, and it opened the same month as Chris, on March 26, at the Provincetown Playhouse for a standard two-week run.²¹⁷ The Players’ program listed the perversely autobiographical one-act depicting O’Neill’s suicide attempt as “A Play of Anti-Climax”—and so it was.²¹⁸ Jasper Deeter, who played Ned Malloy, recalled that O’Neill “wrote both ‘Exorcism’ and ‘Diff’rent’ [the following year] as exercises in anti-climax, experiments, not exercises, because so much in our lives is anti-climax, and he wanted to put it into the theatre.” M. A. McAteer, who played Jimmy, remembered that O’Neill, justifiably, appeared “more than normally worried about the play during rehearsal.”²¹⁹ “When the curtains opened on the second scene,” Deeter said, “I felt like this: Here we are trying to do something impossible for a man who thought that nothing was impossible. ‘Let’s go.’”²²⁰

After Exorcism’s final appearance in April, O’Neill contacted Eleanor “Fitzi” Fitzgerald, now the Players’ dependable business manager, to request all copies of the script. He destroyed them upon receipt, presumably more sickened over his treatment of Jenkins than proud of his redemption with Shane. After that, there was little remaining evidence of the play’s existence—a page of notes, a playbill, a couple of interviews with actors, and a handful of reviews running the gamut from the near rhapsodic (New York Times) to the patently disappointed (New York Tribune).²²¹ In 1922, when Frank Shay, Greenwich Village bookstore owner and publisher of the Provincetown Players’ plays, inquired whether O’Neill would be interested in publishing Exorcism, O’Neill replied, “‘Exorcism’ has been destroyed … and the sooner all memory of it dies the better.”222 (Memory of it refused to die, however: the script was found more than ninety years later, in 2011, among the papers of the Academy Award–winning Hollywood screenwriter Philip Yordan. It was a Christmas gift from Boulton and her subsequent husband, Morris “Mac” Kaufman. The accompanying greeting card reads, “Something-you-said-you’d-like-to-have Agnes + Mac.”)

O’Neill’s prolonged absence that winter ruptured his bond with Boulton irreparably. “I just feel as if I don’t really know anything about you or your plays anymore,” Boulton wrote him. And she resented his victory—or at least her peripheral role in it. Just as the stellar notices for Beyond the Horizon had begun to roll off the presses, Boulton admitted that she could hardly write him at all: “I’d start—write a few stupid words. Then a curious rage—resentment, something that—yes, really!—made me tremble, would overcome me. Against all the circumstances that keep us apart now, just when we should be together! … For, oh Beloved, I have been with you when you were suffering, when despair and loneliness were upon you, and I needed to be with you triumphant! … I wanted to see you happy, proud, elated, secretly intoxicated with this success, which so soon—for such are you!—I’ll see you drop as an empty bauble.” Her prophecy came true soon enough. When John Williams sent a get-well note to O’Neill that cheered exultantly, “The Town is yours,” O’Neill replied acidly, “They can keep it. Success has meant to me the meaningless futility I always knew it would—only more so.”²²³

O’Neill had never heard of the Pulitzer Prize, a national honor first awarded just two years before in 1918, and accepted the news that he’d won it with a Bronx cheer. “Oh, God, a damn medal! And one of those presentation ceremonies! I won’t accept it.”²²⁴ Back in Provincetown, his tune changed when he heard that it came with $1,000, at which point he sprinted down the beach swirling his arms with joy.

Clayton Hamilton had served on the Pulitzer committee that season and championed Beyond the Horizon, thwarting the opposition of novelist and literary lion Hamlin Garland. Garland argued that to reward O’Neill for his “violent and turgid” style, his “ruthlessness for the sake of ruthlessness,” would merely cheapen the award’s gravitas.225

Eugene O’Neill running down the Provincetown beach in 1920 after hearing he won $1,000 for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

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

George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, aware of O’Neill’s unquenchable thirst for liquor, summoned him to the offices of the Smart Set for a “surprise.” When he arrived with Jimmy Light during a brief visit to New York, Nathan and Mencken presented him with a cheap medal to honor his Pulitzer, complete with an outsized safety pin to attach it to his lapel. A bottle of Napoleon brandy and four glasses were placed enticingly on a tray atop a table in the center of the room. When O’Neill grabbed for the bottle, it wouldn’t budge. They’d glued it and the glasses to the tray, which was itself glued to the table. “We have to be going,” they said, straight-faced, then walked out.226

Upon receiving word that his son had won the award, James O’Neill boasted to his friend Clayton Hamilton, “My boy … Eugene; I always knew he had it in him! Remember how I always used to say that he would do something big some day? People told me he was wild and good-for-nothing; but I always knew he had it in him,—didn’t I?” Hamilton laughed, well remembering what James had really said: “The boy would never amount to anything.”²²⁷

On June 10, 1920, James, whose condition had declined precipitously, transferred from a New York hospital to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London. O’Neill took the train down from Provincetown and wrote Agnes from his father’s deathbed. “The situation is frightful! Just a few moments ago he groaned in anguish and cried pitifully: ‘Oh God, why don’t You take me! Why don’t You take me!’” During long hours at his bedside, O’Neill found his seventy-six-year-old father, by then speechless with agonizing pain, a “very pitiful, cruelly ironic thing … [since] all through his life his greatest pride has been in his splendid voice and clear articulation!” “He seems to me a good man, in the best sense of the word,” O’Neill said, “and about the only one I have ever known.” But then he acknowledged the mordant irony that the last words he’d heard his father utter sounded “like a dying dialogue in a play I might have written.” “Glad to go, boy,” James told his son, “a better sort of life—another sort—somewhere. … This sort of life—froth!—rotten!—all of it—no good!,” words that impressed his son as “a warning from the Beyond to remain true to the best that is in me though the heavens fall.”²²⁸

James O’Neill died on August 10, 1920, at four fifteen in the morning. “Helluva time for the old man to die,” Jim grumbled after he’d dutifully supported his mother in the wretched days before and after his father’s death (aside from the occasional drinking jag with Eugene and old friends in downtown New London). James O’Neill’s funeral was a monumental affair for the residents of New London, as they watched crowds of theater people, members of the Knights of Columbus (a fraternal organization in which James had long been a member), various Irish American notables, and community leaders file into St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church to say good-bye to their city’s most famous, if not always most respected, citizen.229

O’Neill found no consolation in the new family he’d created. Upon his return to Peaked Hill Bar, O’Neill, who’d fawned over Shane at first, now considered the child an obstacle to healing his ruptured relationship with Boulton as well as disruptive to his work. O’Neill had never demonstrated any interest in fatherhood before Shane, nor did he pretend to. He complained that the “old sea flavor” of their home had been replaced by the stench of dirty diapers and milk. He put the blame that Boulton hadn’t been with him in New York to celebrate his success and nurse him during his bout of flu squarely on the baby. “It would all be so simple,” he’d written her, “if Shane were not in our midst, or if you only had him weaned.”²³⁰

O’Neill turned violent that summer too. Boulton, though no shrinking violet, characterized him during such episodes as “more like a madman than anything else—a strange being who was not the real Gene at all.” She realized that there were moments, all of them alcohol related, of “sudden and rather dreadful outbursts of violence, and others of bitter nastiness and malevolence.”²³¹ Boulton’s thickly applied makeup didn’t fool anyone in Provincetown. O’Neill had been hitting her. “The promiscuities and the experimental narcotics didn’t interest him,” wrote Provincetown native Hazel Hawthorne of O’Neill at the time. “His sins were not the little ones but the savage ones of hard drinking and wife beating.”²³²

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that during this period O’Neill worked up a treatment for his play The First Man, the story of a workaholic anthropologist who revolts against his wife’s longing for a child. But he then turned to his revision of Chris, now retitled “The Ole Davil,” in which he transformed Anna, at Boulton’s suggestion, from a prim English typist to a sexually abused, streetwise prostitute; and he’d already put the finishing touches on Gold, the full-length version of Where the Cross Is Made. With two unproduced plays ready to send off, O’Neill was moved to turn out something unexpected, something unique to American theater. He had just the thing.

Back in O’Neill’s days at the Garden Hotel, the “old circus man” Jack Croak (the model for Ed Mosher in The Iceman Cometh) had returned from a boondoggle in Haiti and told O’Neill the story of the murderous dictator Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. He’d duped the Haitian people by spreading a legend, O’Neill said, “to the effect that Sam had said they’d never get him with a lead bullet; that he would get himself first with a silver one,” and he promptly jotted down the “story current in Hayti.” Croak also gave him a Haitian coin stamped with Sam’s visage, a talisman O’Neill carried in his pocket as a reminder of the idea’s inception.233

O’Neill at first titled the eight-scene drama “The Silver Bullet” after the Haitian dictator’s scam, but settled on The Emperor Jones. A portrait of one man’s horrifying descent into his racial past, Jones, along with its bold elevation of a black protagonist, signaled a radical departure in American theater: rather than showing life “as it is,” this play would dramatize the stripping away of society’s false trappings and expose humanity at its most primal.²³⁴

Civilization Unmasked

By early October 1920, O’Neill had completed The Emperor Jones, the first play to open American audience’s eyes to European expressionist theater.²³⁵ Characterized by grotesque exaggerations of character and setting and the enactment of distorted psychological fantasies, expressionistic dramas project their heroes’ inner conflicts not only through dialogue but through the scenery as well. “King Lear is given a storm to rant in,” Jimmy Light explained, whereas “the Expressionist hero in anger walks on a street, and all the perspectives of the walls, windows and doors are awry and tortured.”236 For O’Neill, at least, expressionism wasn’t meant simply to entertain or edify; it was meant to induce in his audiences an altered state of consciousness.

O’Neill’s title character, Brutus Jones, is a former porter on the Pullman passenger trains, a convicted murderer, and a fugitive from the law. Jones escapes prison and flees to a Caribbean island, only to betray his race (hence the name “Brutus”) by adopting the role of a white colonialist. An assassination attempt on Jones by a gunman hired by his political rival, the island native “Old Lem,” fails when the gun misfires. After Jones shoots the assassin dead, he declares to the bewildered crowd—made up of those Jones considers “low-flung, bush niggers,” as a white colonialist would—that only a silver bullet can kill him. Jones has a silver bullet crafted for him, proclaiming to the natives, “I’m de on’y man in de world big enuff to git me” (CP1, 1036). He then crowns himself emperor and enacts self-serving, punitive laws that raise taxes from his impoverished subjects. Perched eagerly at his side is a small-time British crook named Smithers, a ferretlike white man whom Jones treats with open disdain. Smithers is greedy, treacherous, and lazy, not coincidentally, in O’Neill’s reversal of the widely held racial beliefs of his time, the characteristics associated with blackness by American white supremacists. Smithers informs Jones what an old native woman has told him—that a rebellion led by Old Lem is brewing in the hills above the palace. The faraway sound of tom-toms softly fills the air. Jones knows his game is up.

Having foreseen a coup against his reign, Jones had memorized the island’s labyrinthine jungle paths, stored caches of food along the way, and made plans to evade the rebel band by escaping to Martinique in a French gunboat. Once informed of the impending revolt, he makes his getaway. “So long, white man,” he bids Smithers farewell, and plunges into the jungle forest (CP1, 1041). During his flight through the jungle, Jones encounters a series of phantasmagoric apparitions that start off as “Formless Little Fears,” then grow more specific to African American oppression—chain gangs, slave auctions, the horrifying “Middle Passage” of slaves crossing the Atlantic, and lastly the banks of the Congo, where Jones meets his reckoning in the form of a crocodile god conjured by an African witch doctor. In the final scene, Jones has been tracked down by island natives who gun him down offstage with specially prepared silver bullets.237

O’Neill’s early schooling in philosophical anarchism with Benjamin Tucker dictates the play’s moral logic. The philosophy’s founding father, Max Stirner, had denied the existence of good or evil, since murder and other crimes are acceptable so long as the state deems them legal. “According to our theories of penal law,” Stirner wrote, “they want to punish men for this or that ‘inhumanity’; and therein they make the silliness of these theories especially plain by their consistency, hanging the little thieves and letting the big ones run.”²³⁸ O’Neill adopts precisely this language to describe the criminal life Brutus Jones embraced after a decade working on the Pullman trains “listenin’ to de white quality talk”: “Ain’t I de Emperor?” he asks Smithers. “De laws don’t go for him. … Dere’s little stealin’ … and dere’s big stealin’. … For de little stealin’ dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin’ dey makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when you croaks” (CP1, 1035). (The 1933 Hollywood film retains Stirner’s language: “Dere’s little stealin’ like you does, and dere’s big stealin’ like I does.” But the suggestion that it was white businessmen on the trains who taught Jones how to steal “big” was, predictably, omitted.)

The play also unmasked an escalating political fiasco: the American government’s disastrous involvement in Haiti. In the fall of 1919, when O’Neill decided to write up Croak’s “story current in Hayti” as a play, the U.S. Marines had just crushed a guerrilla uprising against the protracted American occupation there (1915–34). By the end of the rebellion, approximately three thousand Haitian men, women, and children lay dead. (This was the My Lai Massacre of its time.) As such, O’Neill’s preface to The Emperor Jones coyly identifies the setting as “an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines,” a sarcastic taunt aimed at the absurd legality of “big stealin’” by American business interests abroad (CP1, 1030, 1035).

The Emperor Jones therefore takes place just prior to 1915, a tumultuous political phase for Haiti when four “emperors” ruled its people in as many years before the U.S. Marines took control of the island. Before completing the first year of his dictatorship in 1915, the Haitian dictator Sam, like Jones, was hunted down by insurgents and executed (Jones gets gunned down in the jungle; Sam was torn apart limb from limb in the streets of Port-au-Prince). Sam held close ties with American financial interests, specifically the National City Bank of New York. Thus on the afternoon of the insurgency and Sam’s execution, July 28, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Marines, then patrolling the coast in a warship, to seize the country by force. O’Neill’s original draft, “The Silver Bullet,” specifies that Brutus’s island is “as yet self-determined by the U.S. Marines,” a detail changed to the less explicit “White Marines” in the final play. In so doing, O’Neill partially disguised his politically charged setting.239

In late winter 1920, the NAACP dispatched the African American writer and diplomat James Weldon Johnson to Haiti to investigate the military occupation from a black perspective. Given the lack of reporting in the white press about Haiti and its majority-black citizenry, the American public’s response up to then had been largely indifferent. From August 28 to September 25, 1920, Johnson published a series of four articles in the left-wing journal the Nation, which O’Neill and Boulton read often in Provincetown, wherein Johnson reported in gruesome detail on the atrocities perpetrated by the Marines against the Haitian people.²⁴⁰ With this series, if only for a brief time, Johnson single-handedly placed the otherwise ignored occupation of Haiti on the front pages of newspapers nationwide. The title of the series, “Self-Determining Haiti,” substantiates the connection with O’Neill’s West Indian island “as yet not self-determined by White Marines,” and O’Neill wrote The Emperor Jones from late September to October 3, 1920, one week after the final installation of Johnson’s exposé had appeared.

By then, O’Neill fully recognized that open propaganda should have no place in his work, as it counterproductively weakened a play’s message. A few years later, he told the New York Herald Tribune, “As soon as an author slips propaganda into a play every one feels it and the play becomes simply an argument”; following that, he advised Mike Gold, a sharply political writer who was looking for feedback on his play Hoboken Blues (1929), “My quarrel with propaganda in the theatre is that it’s such damned unconvincing propaganda—whereas, if you will restrain the propaganda purpose to the selection of the life to be portrayed and then let that life live itself without comment, it does your trick.”241 Mentioning the “White Marines” was even less restrained than O’Neill would later become; but if he’d said “the U.S. Marines,” the play might have been mistaken for propaganda and thus prove “damned unconvincing.”²⁴²

The Provincetown Players welcomed The Emperor Jones with near-fanatical zeal, and Jig Cook chose himself to direct it. Cook was profoundly moved by O’Neill’s script, and he seized the opportunity to breathe new life into an idea he and set designer Robert Edmond Jones had been mulling over for some time. They would construct a dome, or “cyclorama”—a Kuppelhorizont, as the Germans called it—for their stage at 133 Macdougal. It would be the first of its kind in the United States. The theater group’s executive committee balked at the scale of the dome project, however, citing a lack of funds for the estimated $500 construction cost. Hearing this, Cook began acting like “a madman,” Edna Kenton said. Each time he broached the subject, the Players said it was impossible, and he’d pick up his hat and storm out. Before long he’d return and declare, “We have to do this.” Impossible. And off he’d march on “another restless tramp.”²⁴³

Days of frustrating denials goaded Cook into designing the dome without the committee’s approval. He next bought bags of cement and other construction materials and slept on the stage at night to save money. The Players relented and emptied their bank account for the project.²⁴⁴ When Cook finished the installation, each of the Players signed the dome as if indelibly marking a child’s plaster cast.²⁴⁵ Cook’s dome allowed them to create lighting effects that gave the illusion of unbounded height and distance, thus enhancing O’Neill’s hallucinatory mise-en-scène. Once the installation was complete, Jimmy Light was awestruck by the dome’s “almost unlimited capacity for suggesting mood, even weather, by means of lighting.”246

Subsequently, Light furnished an explanatory article for Bulletin magazine at the time of The Emperor Jones’s production that remains the most vivid existing description of the dome’s design, assembly, and ultimate purpose: “The dome in the Provincetown Playhouse is made of rigid iron and concrete construction. … The constant rate of change in direction of the surface of the dome in the elliptic and circular form is what gives the sense of infinity. The light rays strike along this curve and are reflected in millions of directions. Every light ray as it strikes the small particles of sand finish casts its shadow as a complementary color. The mingling of a colored light with its complementary color shadow produces, with the constant curve of the surface, the effect of distance and makes the dome appear what it in reality is—a source of light. By varying the lights thrown into the dome one can control the effects emerging from the dome. … There is a parallel between the methods of using the dome and those of Monet in producing atmospheric effects on canvas. In one case light, and the other case color, are placed in juxtaposition as ingredients of a tone which finally arrive at the eye. This tone has the brilliancy of daylight. … When we have installed material and apparatus to take every advantage of the new construction there is absolutely no atmospheric or lighting effect that we cannot achieve.”²⁴⁷

For the play’s sound effects, O’Neill had happened upon an idea while reading about “religious feasts in the Congo.” Tribal members would beat a tom-tom at the normal pulse of the human heart, seventy-two to seventy-five beats per minute; the rhythm then “slowly intensified until the heartbeat of everyone present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drum.” “There was an idea and an experiment,” O’Neill mused. “How would this sort of thing work on an audience in the theater?”²⁴⁸ O’Neill’s stage directions specify that near the end of the first scene, the tom-tom begins at seventy-two beats per minute, then “continues at a gradually accelerating rate from [the end of scene 1] uninterruptedly to the very end of the play” (CP1, 1041). The drumbeat continues to quicken, even through intermission, as the rebels close in and Jones’s nightmares become increasingly horrific. The desired effect was that the audience members’ hearts would start beating along with the tom-tom. “Each succeeding scene left that audience more excited, more keyed up than the previous one,” actress Kyra Markham recalled of the opening. “No play is written for only one performance, but that night was colossal.”249

Provincetown Player Chuck Ellis, a white man, had been the Players’ first choice to play Jones—in blackface. Despite their prior success casting black actors for The Dreamy Kid, they didn’t yet trust that white audiences would come to see a “colored” leading man supported by a white cast. But Ida Rauh held firm. “This isn’t a burlesque,” she said, “this is a serious play.”²⁵⁰ They all assented, but then there was the challenge of finding a black actor who might agree to play a part written in black dialect by a white playwright using the word “nigger.” Jazz guitarist Opal Cooper’s name was floated, but he was out of town for a six-month engagement in Paris. Next, they approached a twenty-two-year-old unknown named Paul Robeson.

At the time, Robeson had only performed in one amateur production, Ridgely Torrence’s Simon the Cyerian at the Harlem YMCA (which O’Neill had reportedly attended). Though untrained as an actor, Robeson was no ordinary performer. He’d been an academic and athletic superstar at Rutgers University: the captain of the debate team; a member of the academic honors society Phi Beta Kappa before his senior year; a “three-letter man” in track, football, and basketball, and picked for the All-American football team; and his soon-legendary baritone voice made him the featured performer in the glee club.²⁵¹ By the time the Players had decided to approach him for the role of Brutus Jones in the fall of 1920, Robeson was studying law at Columbia University while working off his tuition there as an assistant football coach.

Jasper Deeter, who was to play Smithers, had been tasked with recruiting Robeson for the part, and he visited the law student at his Harlem flat. “Yes, what can I do for you?” Robeson asked him at the door. “We’d like you to be in a play by Eugene O’Neill,” said Deeter. “Never heard of him.” But Robeson allowed Deeter inside to read him the script out loud. Before long, Robeson grew so infuriated according to him, that he “couldn’t breathe.” “The more he read me that terrible character,” he recalled, “the angrier I got.” A giant of a man, he could have picked Deeter up and effortlessly hurled him out his window; he said later that he nearly did.252

Deeter returned to Macdougal in one piece, but without his emperor. A future “little dictator” did show up in these first days of planning, however: the silent film impresario Charlie Chaplin, wearing a disguise and giving his name as Charles Spencer (his middle name). For reasons known only to himself, the thirty-one-year old celebrity badly wanted a part in the play. The Players happily welcomed him at first, but Hutch Hapgood warned, “Is that a good idea? Do you know what will happen if word gets around that Chaplin’s going to be in it? The theatre won’t be large enough to hold everybody who’ll want to come, and this will throw Gene’s play right out the window.”²⁵³ The point was well taken, and Chaplin was politely dismissed.

After Ellis, Cooper, and Robeson, the Players’ fourth choice for Brutus Jones was the veteran actor Charles S. Gilpin, one of the founders of the Lafayette Players, Harlem’s first stock company. No stranger to white theater, Gilpin had performed admirably the previous season in John Drinkwater’s hit play Abraham Lincoln as a Frederick Douglass–like emissary on a visit to the sixteenth president. When O’Neill and Light observed Gilpin for the first time, through the box office window from the street outside the playhouse, they both uttered simultaneously, “There he is.”²⁵⁴

Gilpin had led a vagabond life and worked a string of low-paying jobs: barber, printer, elevator operator, janitor, minstrel show performer, boxing trainer and, like the fictional Jones, Pullman porter. Gilpin was also as burly, arrogant, and practiced at the art of survival as his fictional counterpart. “You may know this kind of person,” Robeson had fumed to Jasper Deeter that day in his apartment, “and Mr. O’Neill may know this kind of person, but I don’t.” Gilpin knew him well. “I take my characters out of the street and study them,” he told a New York Tribune reporter. “I have seen ‘The Emperor Jones.’ I have watched his braggadocio and I have seen him delirious with fear. I play him as he really is in life, with very little exaggeration.”255

When O’Neill returned to New York after several sober months of writing in Provincetown, he felt like a sailor again “making port” and summarily embarked upon an “anti-Volstead orgy” with the city’s “poison masquerading as whiskey.” Though for the most part he avoided rehearsals, when he did turn up, he was “deeply excited and gaudily indifferent all at once,” Edna Kenton recalled. He remained largely silent during the final dress rehearsal, but he did correct Gilpin on one point: “Charlie, don’t play the emperor—play the Pullman porter from 137 Street.” This was at eleven thirty at night, two days before opening night, and Gilpin turned to Cook and Light and asked for another run-through. This time, he nailed it. “That was the performance everybody saw,” Light said. “Gene had a great gift as a director. He wouldn’t say much but what he said would go right to the heart of a character. He gave an actor the key.”²⁵⁶

Problems arose between O’Neill and Gilpin over time, however, especially when Gilpin refused to say the word “nigger,” replacing it with euphemisms like “negro” and “colored man.” First, O’Neill threatened him with bodily harm: “If you change the lines again, I’ll beat the hell out of you!” Unfazed, Gilpin still didn’t comply. O’Neill then demanded his dismissal, but that was out of the question. Gilpin was too perfect for the role to lose over a few line changes. O’Neill also castigated the actor for relying on “cheap theatrical tricks,” but he admitted decades later that his personal response to Gilpin had little to do with his performance: “As I look back now on all my work, I can honestly say there was only one actor who carried out every notion of a character I had in mind. That actor was Charles Gilpin as the Pullman porter in The Emperor Jones.”²⁵⁷

“[Gilpin] is a man,” Jig Cook reflected on the actor’s success with the role, “who for years had within himself the power to mount to the top of the ladder, and there has been no ladder, none upon which circumstances permitted a man of his race to set foot.” “Eugene O’Neill made the ladder,” he said, adding that he couldn’t have done it without the Players’ philosophy of collaborative theater. Their innovations in lighting and sound, Cook said, combined with designer Cleon Throckmorton’s primordial sets, amplified Gilpin’s tour de force performance and O’Neill’s groundbreaking script: “Had O’Neill not been a member of a group which he knows to be ready to attempt the untried—ready to make any interesting new departure—he would have no incentive to write ‘The Emperor Jones.’” O’Neill concurred. Together, he remarked a month into the production, the Players had formed “a new ingenuity and creative collaboration on the part of the producer—a new system of staging of extreme simplicity and flexibility which, combined with art in lighting, [permitted] many scenes and instantaneous changes, a combination of the scope of the movies with all that is best of the spoken drama.”258

On the night of November 1, 1920, the crowded line to the box office for the premiere of The Emperor Jones stretched up the block to Washington Square. “You cannot see it unless you are a subscriber or the guest of a subscriber,” the New York Sun alerted its readers. “So subscribe now and avoid the rush. Telephone Spring 8363 and secure your reservations.” At $7.15 a subscription, the Players added a thousand members to their “sacred list” in the first week, for a total of fifteen hundred. They also expanded their performances to Sundays, though since there was a prohibition against Sunday performances in New York, admission was limited to “membership ticket only or by guest ticket purchased through a member.” The New York Sabbath Committee still contacted the police. Cook and Light, with their lawyer Harry Weinberger, battled the charge of “violating the law against Sunday theatricals” in court and won on the grounds that 133 Macdougal was a private clubhouse, not a professional theater.²⁵⁹

Among the throng at Macdougal Street on one of those nights was James Weldon Johnson, author of “Self-Determining Haiti,” who’d recently been elected the first black president of the NAACP. Johnson noted that The Emperor Jones wasn’t the first American play to rise above the grotesque distortions of black-faced minstrelsy, the hugely popular variety shows that caricatured “happy darkies.” Ridgely Torrence’s three one-act plays with the Coloured Players at Madison Square Garden in 1917, he said (also designed by Robert Edmond Jones), deserved that distinction. But The Emperor Jones starred a black man supported by a white cast and, Johnson observed, “No previous effort on the stage with African American actors and themes, so far as the Negro is concerned, evoked more than favorable comment.” Thanks in large part to Gilpin’s operatic interpretation of the role, he said, “another important page in the history of the Negro in the theatre was written. … By his work in The Emperor Jones Gilpin reached the highest point of achievement on the legitimate stage that had yet been attained by a Negro in America.”260

The Emperor Jones ran for an extended run of seven weeks before it moved uptown on December 27 to the Selwyn Theater. “They didn’t really understand what I was writing,” O’Neill recalled bitterly about the droves of fashionable New Yorkers in attendance. “They merely said to themselves, ‘Oh look, the ape can talk!’”²⁶¹ Still, the production moved on to the Princess, the Majestic in Brooklyn, and the Shubert Brothers’ Riviera Theatre; after 490 performances around New York, it spun off on a thirty-five-week national tour.²⁶² By 1928, even as sophisticated a theatergoer as the novelist Edith Wharton, who respected O’Neill as “our only real playwright,” quipped to a friend, with a racist reference to the trend The Emperor Jones had started, “No one knows how long a play without murderers or niggers will be able to hold the public.”²⁶³

The company understood that the tour in the South wouldn’t be without its perils. But the Players couldn’t have foreseen how hostile the pushback would be from white supremacists. After an engagement before thousands of students at the traditionally black Howard University in Washington, D.C., the play moved on to Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia (Gilpin’s hometown), where it was so well received it attracted the ire of the Ku Klux Klan. The “Ku Klux jackasses,” as O’Neill called them after hearing about the incident, sent a letter to Gilpin’s hotel warning the actor not to travel below the Mason-Dixon line. The warning was heeded, and the company redirected the tour to Ohio. They never went further south than Richmond.²⁶⁴

Charles S. Gilpin (right) as Brutus Jones with the African witch doctor, performed by Japanese Noh dancer Michio Itow, in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at the Provincetown Playhouse, November 1, 1920. The brilliant lighting effect is generated by George “Jig” Cook’s dome.

(PHOTO BY JESSIE TARBOX BEALS. COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

The Emperor Jones infuriated many within the African American community as well; the portrayal of Jones “does not elevate the negro,” they contended.265 And it wasn’t just O’Neill’s use of the “N-word” (though that didn’t help, nor did the minstrel-sounding dialect). Rather, it was the more odious perpetuation of the stereotype of black Americans as innately superstitious. As the white Brooklyn Daily Eagle critic ignorantly wrote of O’Neill’s antihero, “Jones is shrewd and stupid, remorseless and genial, far-seeing and superstitious, uniting in himself the racial qualities which make the American negro a problem and a delight.”²⁶⁶

By portraying blacks as susceptible to irrational fears, O’Neill was in fact walking the same perilous tightrope that Mark Twain had several decades before him. Yet both O’Neill and Twain shared the belief that Christianity was no less superstitious than any other supernatural faith. From the beginning of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Huck Finn sees little difference between his friends Tom Sawyer and the slave Jim’s rites involving dead cats and Irish potatoes and the Sunday School he’s forced to attend; in The Emperor Jones, O’Neill pits even more “primitive” superstitions against the white-sanctified superstition of Christianity. Preparing to sacrifice himself to the crocodile god, Jones cries out for mercy for “dis po’ sinner” and prays to “Lawd Jesus” to save him, contrasting the god of the enslavers with the pagan god of his African ancestry (CP1, 1058, 1059). (O’Neill had been conscious of his use of racial superstition with The Dreamy Kid, too, but had regrettably disregarded what would later be made evident in Jones: when Agnes Boulton read Dreamy’s resolution to wait by his grandmother’s deathbed in spite of the danger of the police, Boulton mistakenly assumed it was love that made him stay. “No,” O’Neill replied, then slowly read out Mammy’s threat and Dreamy’s terrified response: “‘If yo’ leave me now yo’ ain’t goin’ to get no bit of luck so long as yo’ live, I tell yo’ dat!’ … ‘Don’t yo’ hear de curse she puts on me if I does?’”)²⁶⁷

Back in the winter of 1915–16, O’Neill had written little of consequence and spent most of his time at the Hell Hole getting stewed with Terry Carlin; but he did manage to commit a key poem to paper, a few lines that both look forward to The Emperor Jones and tackle the apparent human need, even for atheists like himself, for superstition of any kind. This untitled work contains, like Jones, the relentless beat of a tom-tom drum, the primal rhythms of the African jungle and the Congo, the existential terror of recognizing one’s pointlessness in an indifferent universe, and then, most significantly, a futile last-minute plea to a higher power. The final stanza reads:

And here we sit!

You and I—

In the Congo of the soul

All the reverberating tom-toms

Of everlasting infancy

Are drumming out the boom-boom-boom—

(The presence of God in one’s ear-drums)

Until one’s atheism

Shrieks in the Dark

And cowers on a heap of dung

To pray!268

Not all African American critics decried O’Neill’s approach. When the West Indian American “father of Harlem radicalism” Hubert Henry Harrison reviewed The Emperor Jones for the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, he noted regretfully that when Boni and Liveright published the book that April (with Diff’rent and The Straw), the publisher had foolishly advertised the play as “a study of the psychology of fear and of race superstition.” “A censorious critic might cavil at the propriety of the last four words,” Harrison admitted, “but the rest of the statement is quite correct. It is pre-eminently a psychological study.” Singling out Gilpin’s performance in particular as “a work of genius … [that] stands on its own feet and justifies itself,” Harrison countered what he otherwise thought a “commendable racial pride” from other black critics: “Mr. O’Neill, in portraying the soul of an ignorant and superstitious person of any race could not be so silly as to put in that person’s mouth the language of a different sort of person. He did the best he could—and he did it very well.” “The fault, dear Brutus,” he said, quoting Shakespeare while alluding to O’Neill’s protagonist, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”269 Harrison would later compare Marcus Garvey’s demagoguery to Brutus Jones’s after Garvey had been convicted in 1923 for, Harrison noted in his diary, “using the mails to defraud his ‘fellow-men of the negro race.’”²⁷⁰ “He gave them what they wanted,” Harrison wrote in a damning critique of Garvey and his followers. “And at this point I am reminded of ‘The Emperor Jones’—a fine picture of the whole psychology of the Garvey movement.”²⁷¹

On June 9, a few days after Harrison’s review of The Emperor Jones was published, O’Neill responded to its author with deep gratitude for his interpretation, “one of the very few intelligent criticisms of the piece that have come to my notice.”²⁷² In this unpublished letter, O’Neill expressed his desire that Gilpin’s talent might inspire black playwrights, and he again argued that propaganda meant to “elevate” the disenfranchised doesn’t “strike home”: “I am glad to see you remonstrate with those of your people who find fault with the play because it does not ‘elevate.’ Such folk do not realize that the only propaganda that ever strikes home is the truth about the human soul, black or white. Intentional uplift plays never amount to a damn—especially as uplift. To portray a human being, that is all that counts. … And, by the way, that same criticism of ‘Jones’ which you protest against is a very common one made by a similar class of white people about my other plays—they don’t ‘elevate’ them. So you see!”²⁷³

“I am hoping in the time between now and the end of the play’s career,” O’Neill continued, “to write another Negro play which I have in mind—in which case my association with Mr. Gilpin, always a pleasant one from the very start, may be continued and his ‘Where do I go from here?’ may find a solution to his liking. He is a wonderful actor and should not go playless.” The other “Negro play” O’Neill had in mind, about his friend Joe Smith from the Hell Hole, was going to be titled either “White” or “Honest Honey Boy.” His 1921 work diary reads: “‘Joe’—tragic-comedy of negro gambler (Joe Smith)—8 scenes—4 in N.Y. of his heyday—4 in present N.Y. of Prohibition times, his decline.”²⁷⁴ (His next “Negro play,” also related to Joe Smith’s life, would be All God’s Chillun Got Wings, produced in 1924, but the original idea would be more fully realized as the background for Joe Mott in The Iceman Cometh.)

O’Neill nevertheless recognized that he was writing as an outsider and saw the need for the black experience to be written from within. “Don’t you think the writers among your people should be encouraged—and urged—to try and write plays for [Gilpin]?” O’Neill wrote to Harrison. “Something very fine for the Negro in general might evolve from such an attempt.” Indeed, black writers, artists, and musicians were just then emerging from Harlem, and for them Brutus Jones’s white tyranny might also be read as a cautionary tale: while serving as a judge for a Harlem playwriting contest, O’Neill counseled its participants to ignore white literary authority. “Be yourselves,” he advised. “Don’t reach out for our stuff which we call good!”275

By the close of the 1920–21 season, Charles Gilpin had become the first African American listed by the Drama League of New York as one of the top ten people who had done the most that year for American theater. The League traditionally honors its chosen few at its annual gala; but a public outcry erupted over the invitation of a black man to the exclusive gathering, and the Drama League hastily, if contritely, withdrew Gilpin’s invitation. In spite of a growing dislike for his leading man, O’Neill, also on the list, was revolted by the League’s pandering to its racist membership, and he and the critic Kenneth Macgowan, the League’s former director with whom O’Neill had developed close ties during Beyond the Horizon’s run, together petitioned the other recipients to turn down their invitations—which they all did. Gilpin’s invitation was promptly reinstated and the event was a great success. A decade later, James Weldon Johnson wrote that the affair had already taken on “an archaic character. It is doubtful if a similar incident today could provide such a degree of asininity.”²⁷⁶

Gilpin originally thought he’d make an appearance at the gala of “about four minutes.” He proudly admitted that after his performances he wouldn’t go “hobnobbing” with the white theater crowd either, instead returning to his “little circle of friends” in Harlem, “where I belong.” But after receiving the night’s longest standing ovation, he said, “I stayed for four hours and had the time of my life. No, it didn’t take much nerve to go and face the crowd. I could count on the artists treating me fairly, and I didn’t care a hang about the others. They could sit there and stare at me as though I were some kind of a prize monkey and it wouldn’t disturb me at all.”277

The NAACP awarded Gilpin the Spingarn Medal in 1921 for “the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro during the preceding year or years,” and President Warren Harding invited him to dine with him at the White House. But O’Neill said in April of that year that Gilpin was ultimately edged out of the production in early 1922 because of “the effect of too much alcohol and actor’s swell head [egotism].” At one point in New York, he’d reasoned with Gilpin, one alcoholic to another: “Charlie, if you won’t keep a bottle in your dressing room, we’ll let you have a drink after each scene.” Gilpin accepted the terms, and the Players served the actor a shot after each scene, making it seven shots total before the last scene, when Jones’s lifeless body is carried onstage by the natives who’d gunned him down. Whether because of or in spite of such measures, Gilpin’s drinking problem continued to spiral out of control, and Paul Robeson agreed to replace Gilpin for the London production in 1923. Robeson by then had come to see Brutus Jones as a “great part” and the play “a true classic of the drama, American or otherwise.” O’Neill was equally impressed with Robeson, who became a cherished compatriot in the years to come. From the first, O’Neill thought the actor a “wonderful presence & voice, full of ambition and a damn fine man personally with real brains—not a ‘ham’”—like Gilpin.²⁷⁸

Though after this humiliating dismissal, Gilpin was hired for the occasional role, including several revivals as Brutus Jones, his acting career never fully rebounded. In 1930, he died in poverty on a chicken farm in New Jersey at age fifty-one. His death notice in the black press lamented that after his breakout performance in The Emperor Jones, Gilpin had been “the envy of the theatrical world. If America had been a fully civilized country, he would have gone on to greater fame—he would have electrified the stage as Othello. But the chance never came, and one of America’s great actors was left to die broken-hearted.”279

The Emperor Jones marked the beginning of the end for the Provincetown Players, too, at the same time, paradoxically, it had launched them into the public eye. “Values had shifted overnight, astonishingly,” Edna Kenton later wrote. After the notoriety of The Emperor Jones, most of the Players would no longer settle for less than Broadway greatness: “To go uptown with our first success was higher honor than to stay down town with our experiments. It was human; it was natural … we were a little drunk with the wine of applause and we lost our balance and fell.” Kenton believed that their only savior from ruin was Jack Reed; but then the tragic news arrived. Reed had died of typhus in Russia, with Bryant at his side, less than two weeks before the opening night of Jones, and he lay buried, after a Soviet hero’s funeral, inside the Kremlin walls. “If Jack could have risen from his grave in the Red Square at Moscow and come back to us for just one night—that night,” Kenton said, “when we decided to go uptown with The Emperor Jones. … But Jack was lying in his tomb at Moscow and Jig was an old prophet, saying over and over again familiar words that held no meaning any more for most of us. He knew it.”²⁸⁰

In truth, Cook’s ideas, however inspiring, were often incomprehensible to the other Players. “It was a kind of drunkenness that is beyond recall,” the writer and Provincetowner Djuna Barnes reminisced over Cook’s heady notions of community theater. “Jig who could inspire divergent minds to work together for one idea, an ideal that was never quite clear to him, or if clear to him, one that he could not make clear to me nor to a number of others, sent his actors on a scent of no man’s rabbit. It was, I think, Jig’s rabbit, Jig’s conjuring trick; he knew the passes, he spoke the formula, he had the hat, but—was he too proud, or was he too wise, or was he too limited to produce the hare? Who knows?—but it made good hunting.”²⁸¹

The Theatre F(r)eud

By the time O’Neill sent The Emperor Jones off to Macdougal Street the previous October of 1920, he’d already completed his next play, Diff’rent. The Players opened the two-act on December 27, the day The Emperor Jones moved uptown. Diff’rent, like its predecessor, also moved to several uptown theaters (the Selwyn, the Times Square, the Princess); but unlike its predecessor, it received a tepid critical response. Kenneth Macgowan applauded O’Neill’s gifts but lamented that “the unescapable impression of anyone who remembers ‘The Emperor Jones’ and its fine imaginative quality, its color, and its spiritual power, and compares it with ‘Diff’rent,’ must be that the newer play is a step backward for its author.” Barrett Clark joked the play was a box office flop, “even with the help of the censor who tried to stop it.” Following his enormous successes with Beyond the Horizon and The Emperor Jones, O’Neill shrugged off the failure: “Well, this is rather reassuring. I had begun to think I was too popular to be honest.”282

Based loosely on a story Fifine Clark told O’Neill about a local Provincetown woman, Diff’rent portrays a repressed middle-aged woman who seeks a degenerate younger man’s sexual attention in a coastal New England town. The posters stapled on the billboards around Manhattan thus announced the play lasciviously as a “daring study of a sex-starved woman.”²⁸³ As a consequence, O’Neill grumbled, the play “aroused the ire of all the feminists against me.”²⁸⁴ He forcefully denied their accusations that his heroine, Emma Crosby, was meant to reflect all women: “She is universal only in the sense that she reacts definitely to a definite sex-suppression, as every woman might. The form her reaction takes is absolutely governed by her environment and her own character. Let the captious be sure they know their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how she would act.”²⁸⁵

Worse yet, the news media forged an intellectual pairing that would hound O’Neill to his grave: Sigmund Freud, the celebrated German psychologist, had gained a wide following in the United States, and many critics believed O’Neill was peddling bandwagon psychoanalysis. The New York Sun fired a warning shot: “There is a tendency among the Provincetown Players to present plays that turn their stage into a Freudian clinic. This inclination should not be overplayed unless these ambitious and successful players desire their little Macdougal street playhouse to become known as the Theatre Freud.”286

The New York Tribune’s drama critic Heywood Broun, a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, who generally thought of O’Neill as punching above his intellectual weight, also happened to be the husband of feminist writer Ruth Hale. Glaspell warned O’Neill that Hale “objected strongly” to the play’s sexist implications and gave him the impression that Broun was prepared to publish his wife’s review of Diff’rent under his own byline.²⁸⁷ Whichever of them did write it, the notice took the other criticisms a step farther. Not only had O’Neill written a trendy Freudian play, he also didn’t know what he was talking about: “O’Neill seems ill informed of the more searching theories of sex psychology. He does not understand that repressed instincts tend to burrow deeper and deeper and without some adequate explanation the sudden impulse of the heroine to translate into actuality the desires which she has long suppressed, or perhaps sublimated, is not convincing.”²⁸⁸ Within two weeks, the Tribune printed a self-restrained but pointed riposte by O’Neill. Any channeling of Freud’s work into his own was incidental, he insisted. As far back as the Greeks, Freud’s postulations had been available to anyone “intuitive” enough to grasp them.²⁸⁹ “What has influenced my plays,” he said, “is my knowledge of the drama of all time—particularly Greek tragedy—and not any books on psychology.”²⁹⁰

In fact, in 1920 his reading of Freud was limited to Totem and Taboo (1913).²⁹¹ (He would later read Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1925 to assist in his effort to quit drinking.)²⁹² He’d also read Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) after it was translated to English in 1916. “If I have been influenced unconsciously,” he admitted later, “it must have been by [Jung’s] book more than any other psychological work.”²⁹³ “The Freudian brethren and sisteren seem quite set up about it and, after reading astonishing complexes between the lines of my simplicities, claim it for their own. Well, so some of them did with ‘Emperor Jones.’ They are hard to shake!”²⁹⁴ “Whether it is psychoanalytically exact or not,” he said, “I will leave more dogmatic students of Freud and Jung than myself (or than Freud and Jung) to decide. It is life, nevertheless. I stick out for that—life that swallows all formulas.”295

That winter, O’Neill swore a “New Year’s oath” to quit drinking and went back to work on The First Man. If he’d felt cowed by the feminist or Freudian backlash caused by Diff’rent, this play didn’t show it. In what itself might have been read as a four-act Freudian slip, The First Man exposes O’Neill’s actual hostility toward the whole-cloth demands and limitations of family life. His marriage to Boulton doesn’t appear to have been the problem, at least not yet. On April 12, 1921, he’d arranged for friends in New York to buy and ship a longed-for kimono for their third anniversary, and he missed her terribly whenever events conspired to separate them—for the first few days, at least.²⁹⁶

In late April, the chronically bad state of O’Neill’s teeth induced him to travel up to his friend Saxe Commins’s new dental practice in Rochester, New York. (Commins’s first name is pronounced like the instrument, but O’Neill referred to him as “Sox.”)²⁹⁷ O’Neill had met Commins, Stella Ballantine’s brother, back when the Players produced Commins’s play The Obituary in 1916 during their first season in New York. Both reticent men among outgoing thespians, they’d bonded over their quiet ways; but after this trip to Rochester, a friendship was forged that would endure through O’Neill’s final years.

But after more than a week of excruciating root canals and extractions, O’Neill longed to be back with his wife: “God, how I wish you were here! I love you so! It is truly love that passeth all bounds, beyond which there is nothing. I am You. So take care of the real me whilst this poor ghost is haunting dental parlors!”²⁹⁸ The flurry of love letters back and forth tapered off after a week or so, however, replaced by the commonplace matters of domestic and professional life—Shane’s health, bills, Provincetown gossip, Terry Carlin’s drunken antics, production schedules, the condition of Peaked Hill, and so on. Later that summer O’Neill felt miserable and neglected as he labored on his writing while Boulton went off for the month of August on a whirlwind tour to visit friends in Boston, Jim and Ella O’Neill in New London, members of her own family in Litchfield, Connecticut, then down to West Point Pleasant and back up to New York and Westchester County to hunt for a winter residence.

While she was gone, he’d finished The First Man and revisited his “Fountain of Youth” play, The Fountain, about Juan Ponce de León’s quest for eternal life in the New World. “If I really believed that The Fountain were as rotten as it seems to me now I’d hang the script out on the hook in the toilet,” O’Neill wrote to Boulton. “Either it is a dead thing or I am. … Come home and bring my life back! These days crawl sufferingly like futile purgatories.”299

After a frustrating week of false starts and delays, O’Neill’s four-act Gold opened at New York’s Frazee Theater on June 1, 1921. Once he’d attended rehearsals with its notoriously histrionic star, Willard Mack, O’Neill knew it would be a catastrophic failure. Several rehearsals in, he recused himself and “got good and ‘pickled’ to chase the memory of it away.” Having absorbed toxic amounts of Prohibition rotgut, O’Neill made his way back to Provincetown in order, he said, “to regain sanity and await the crash.”³⁰⁰ Boulton went down on her own to oversee the final rehearsals and report back on the opening night. O’Neill remained at Peaked Hill to lick his wounds and continue work on The Fountain, but was soon buoyed by news that producer Arthur Hopkins had optioned “Anna Christie,” his revised version of Chris, for production that fall.

John D. Williams, the financial muscle behind Beyond the Horizon and now Gold, was an alcoholic in his own right, and he might have been more “pickled” than usual when he approved Gold’s press release: “Eugene O’Neill’s greatest drama … the greatest dramatic event of the year!!”³⁰¹ The absurd hyperbole of this statement was laid conspicuously bare on opening night. “Talky, balky, tiresome and impossible,” brayed Variety.³⁰² The Nation accused O’Neill of beginning to sound like a broken record—another charge, like Freud and misogyny, that has withstood the test of history: “We cannot rid ourselves of the feeling that we have heard all this before.”³⁰³ When George Jean Nathan told O’Neill that he actually liked aspects of Gold, even its author responded with terse finality, “You’re wrong. It’s a bad play. I’m telling you.”³⁰⁴

Heywood Broun was goaded by the play into calling for a moratorium on the “great-great-grandchildren of Ophelia.” “Madness, to be sure,” he wrote, “is a stage convention much abused. Ophelia can hardly have died in any such untimely manner as Shakespeare pretends. She has left too many grandchildren to the dramatists of all succeeding centuries.” In a later review, Broun added, “Ophelia really ought to have heeded the advice of Hamlet and got her to a nunnery. She has bequeathed a tiresome strain to the theater. The defective drama is too much with us.”305 After this, O’Neill’s low opinion of Broun curdled into a rancid hatred. To the playwright, Broun was now “a proper yellow son of a bitch. … A faker and liar, envious, etc.”³⁰⁶

O’Neill hadn’t yet admitted it to himself, but Broun wasn’t far off the mark. He denied Freud’s influence to the very end; but he did feel shackled by the constraints of dramatic realism, which concealed what he called “the submerged mountain” that shaped human behavior. The realist movement, thanks for the most part to Henrik Ibsen, had mercifully given the vaudevillian hook to the cheap romances and tawdry melodramas of James O’Neill’s generation; but it had also dragged the soliloquy offstage along with them. This was the problem he had to contend with as a dramatist. Up to then, the only solution to match the depth of the soliloquy or the novel that had presented itself, in Jimmy Light’s words, was “psychopathic raving,” which was “still realism and not passé dramaturgy if the heroine is psychotic and the lines do make literal sense.”³⁰⁷ Susan Glaspell had also employed mentally unhinged women in her one-acts Trifles (1916) and The Outside (1917) as well as in The Verge, a full-length the Players would produce that November 1921, but Glaspell’s women had conveyed a deeper understanding at work. “And that is called sanity. And made a virtue—to lock one in,” her protagonist Claire Archer in The Verge says to her husband, then declares, “No, I’m not mad. I’m—too sane!” Or perhaps, Claire reflects, Emily Dickinson–like, “Madness … is the only chance for sanity.”³⁰⁸ Though Diff’rent and Gold were critical failures because of their purposeful use of psychic malfunction, O’Neill would revisit Ophelia’s descendants over the years with a racist white woman driven to madness by her marriage to an ambitious black man in All God’s Chillun Got Wings; a fantastical treatment of the Oedipal complex in More Stately Mansions; and, most poignantly and self-consciously, his drugged mother in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “The Mad Scene,” Jamie Tyrone scoffs when Mary descends the stairs in a morphine-induced haze. “Enter Ophelia!” (CP3, 824).

The First Man, which O’Neill copyrighted that October 1921, on the same day as The Fountain, was originally conceived as a modern recounting of Jason and the Argonauts’ quest for the Golden Fleece (the protagonist’s surname is “Jayson”). Instead, the play wound up being O’Neill’s first intentional foray into the gender wars. He’d complained about feminists giving him a hard time after Diff’rent, “as if the same theme could have been woven with equal truth about a man, with a different reaction, of course.”309 This time, he had his female counterpart in the form of Susan Glaspell, who was writing her own gender play, The Verge, that same summer in Provincetown.

Glaspell’s Claire Archer offers a singular window into the literary cross-pollination between Glaspell and O’Neill. Like O’Neill’s protagonist Curtis Jayson, Claire also balks at the constraints of parenting in favor of self-actuation. In the final scene, she rejects her conformist daughter and husband and murders her lover, all of whom she views as symbols of social and psychological entropy. O’Neill, in his early play Servitude, had written a neglectful father and husband in David Roylston, a character who would have gotten under a female audience’s skin had it been produced; with The First Man, likely emboldened by Glaspell’s work in progress, nakedly exposed his jaundiced view of domestic living.

What appears to have inspired The First Man more than his marriage was the imprisonment of fatherhood. O’Neill’s protagonist Curtis Jayson is an ambitious anthropologist searching the globe for evidence of “the first man.” He and his wife, Martha, have lost two children to pneumonia before the action of the play, a tragedy that brings about a ten-year world tour and a compact between them to have no more children. When Curtis turns on Martha for getting pregnant without his permission and defends their child-free existence, he sounds eerily like O’Neill at the time he was courting Agnes Boulton:

CURTIS: Haven’t we been sufficient, you and I together? Isn’t that a more difficult, beautiful happiness to achieve than—children? Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I need you so terribly—for myself, for my work—for everything that is best and worthiest in me?310

O’NEILL: You [Boulton] had seemed to me alone and virginal and somehow—with nothing but yourself. I wanted you alone … in an aloneness broken by nothing. Not even by children of our own.³¹¹

BOULTON: To be alone with me—that was what he wanted; we had everything—work, love and companionship. Never, never let anything interfere with work or love!³¹²

Martha Jayson dies in childbirth in a tragic final scene, complete with blood-curdling shrieks of agony offstage that would appall audiences when it eventually opened in March of 1922. Martha’s infant survives to be raised by nurses until Curtis returns from his expedition.

Late that summer, Boulton felt certain she’d become pregnant again and took, she said, “strong medicine” to end the pregnancy. In mid-August, during her visit to Litchfield, she wrote O’Neill assuring him that she was monitoring her periods closely (September 11 being her next “Red-letter day”). “The joke of it is,” she told him, “I came sick on the day which was O.K. according to my second set of calculations—so there wasn’t much chance of anything being wrong. Hereafter, let’s hang a calendar in the bedroom! (You’d enjoy that!)”³¹³

“Anna Christie” opened on November 2, 1921, at the Vanderbilt Theatre, the day before The Straw’s out-of-town New London premiere. Nearly everyone loved it, aside from, as was the case with In the Zone, its creator. (A predictable exception to the general acclaim was Heywood Broun: “After seeing ‘Anna Christie’ we cannot escape feeling that Eugene O’Neill has not yet lifted himself out of being ‘the most promising playwright in America.’”)³¹⁴ The curtain opened to reveal Robert Edmond Jones’s much praised rendering of the interior of Johnny “the Priest’s,” a bar based on O’Neill’s old hangout Jimmy the Priest’s. In the stage directions, O’Neill describes the bar in minute detail, and his dialogue re-creates the common slang and defiant attitudes of the waterfront figures he knew intimately. Anna Christopherson, a young prostitute, has arrived in town to reunite with her seafaring father, Chris Christopherson (O’Neill’s friend from Jimmy’s), and Anna agrees to sail with him on his barge from New York to Boston. Trapped in a fog bank off the Massachusetts coast, they rescue a shipwrecked, Driscoll-like Irish sailor named Mat Burke, and he and Anna fall in love. Chris doesn’t approve of the union, as he believes that the sea, embodied for him by the Irishman, is an “ole davil” responsible for annihilating his family back in Sweden. Now his daughter has fallen under its spell.

“Anna Christie” garnered even larger box office returns than Beyond the Horizon or The Emperor Jones. The drama critic James Whittaker proclaimed, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that with “Anna Christie,” “Eugene O’Neill has turned New York into what is known in stage vernacular as a ‘dog town.’” (“Dog town” was theater argot for smaller cities where tryouts are held before a play moves to New York.) “He has bewitched those flinty mercenaries, the managers,” he wrote in mock disbelief. “For him all the vulgar preliminaries to production are dispensed with. … He does not have to peddle script on the Broadway curb. He does not have to have a letter from a Senator to pass through doors. And he does not have to travel to Wilmington, Del., to see his play staged in secret, and lend a humiliated hand to its stealthy rewriting.”315 Tongue-in-cheek as Whittaker’s pronouncement sounds, the truth behind it was undeniable. Clayton Hamilton’s warning at the New London station that when a dramatist submitted a script there was “not one chance in a thousand it will ever be read; not one chance in a million of its ever being accepted” was a rule that no longer applied to Eugene O’Neill.

Audiences confounded O’Neill by cheering the notoriously gloomy playwright’s “happy-ever-after,” and very few critics departed “Anna Christie” with the sense of tragic fate he’d intended. When George Jean Nathan read the four-act play the previous winter, Nathan prophetically warned his friend that the final scene would be regarded as a “happy ending,” whereas O’Neill, he knew, wished to evoke the sea’s “conquest of Anna.” O’Neill insisted that the moment when Mat discovers Anna is non-Catholic—not religious at all, in fact—the integrity of her “oath” to forget the past and never return to prostitution is slippery at best. But the “weak-minded” arm of the press had latched on so firmly to the idea of the happy ending that he was moved to publish a denial in the New York Times: “In this type of naturalistic play, which attempts to translate life into its own terms, I am a denier of all endings. Things happen in life, run their course as the incidental, accidental, the fated, then pause to give their inevitable consequences time to mobilize for the next attack. … The curtain falls. Behind it their lives go on.” “Lastly,” he concluded, “to those who think I deliberately distorted my last act because a ‘happy ending’ would be calculated to make the play more of a popular success I have only this to say: The sad truth is that you have precedents enough to spare in the history of our drama for such a suspicion. But, on the other hand, you have every reason not to believe it of me.”316

O’Neill wrote the final scene of “Anna Christie” to act as a figurative “comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten.” At one point, he even toyed with naming it Comma.³¹⁷ But almost no one got this. Burns Mantle, for instance, summed it up in his Evening Mail review: “When the record of his playwriting achievements is written, ‘Anna Christie’ will likely be pointed to as the first Eugene O’Neill play in which the morbid young genius compromised with the happy ending all true artists of the higher drama so generously despise.” Nathan railed against such critics who “snicker self-satisfiedly that he has arbitrarily stuck a theatrical happy ending onto his play. In them the poison of the showshop has worked so long that it is simply impossible for them to consider him as an autonomous artist.” Among the critics, Alexander Woollcott of the New York Times was a notable exception: “O’Neill seems to be suggesting to the departing playgoers that they can regard this as a happy ending if they are short-sighted enough to believe it and weak-minded enough to crave it.”³¹⁸

That American audiences would applaud a respectable marriage as a happy ending for a “girl gone bad” was a remarkable development nevertheless.319 Even the quotation marks around the name (rarely respected as part of his title) are meant to accentuate that “Anna Christie” is a prostitute’s street name. Beyond that, the play contained unmistakably feminist overtones: when Anna’s father and lover argue over who will control her future, she stops them, delivering what can only be read as a feminist’s decree: “Gawd, you’d think I was a piece of furniture! … I’ll do what I please and no man, I don’t give a hoot who he is, can tell me what to do! I ain’t askin’ either of you for a living. I can make it myself—one way or other” (CP1, 1007).

Kenneth Macgowan crowed that with this play O’Neill had made “dramatic history”: “It is hard to think of any American play that is the superior of Eugene O’Neill’s newest work in truth of life or in dramatic force.”³²⁰ O’Neill himself soon publicly renounced it, not only for the widespread belief in its happy ending but for its “naturalism,” which he defined simply as drama that’s “true to life.”³²¹ “Naturalism is too easy,” he told a reporter. “It would, for instance, be a perfect cinch to go on writing Anna Christies all my life. I could always be sure of the rent then. … Because you can say practically nothing at all of our lives since 1914 through that form. The naturalistic play is really less natural than a romantic or expressionistic play. That is, shoving a lot of human beings on a stage and letting them say the identical things in a theatre they would say in a drawing room or a saloon does not necessarily make for naturalness.” “It’s what those men and women do not say,” O’Neill said, “that usually is most interesting.”³²²

O’Neill’s The Straw premiered at the Lyceum Theatre in New London on November 3, then moved to the Greenwich Village Theatre a week later. The Straw, about his time at Gaylord Farm, would always remain one of O’Neill’s personal favorites. As he told George Tyler, its producer, he considered it “the best play I have written—better even than Beyond the Horizon.” Most critics dismissed it, however, as decent in quality of dialogue but grimly clinical in theme and setting. One reviewer described it as “the most lugubrious and depressing play that could possibly be encountered within theatre walls.” “We wish Mr. O’Neill would stick to the sea as his background,” said another. “His salt water dramas never make us seasick, but this play sort of makes us landsick, as it were. … This particular sanitarium may cure a patient when there is the straw of love and hope to cling to, but it is likely to kill the audience.” Yet another chided O’Neill for his “tuberculosis Romeo and Juliet,” suggesting that the dramatist “will probably write a musical comedy around cancer later on.” When Jimmy Light had first read it, he’d found the love story impossible to believe. O’Neill replied, “Something like that happened to me once.”323

O’Neill’s tragic heroine Eileen Carmody dies from her disease, just as Kitty MacKay, O’Neill’s “kitten,” had two years after O’Neill’s release from Gaylord Farm; but the tragedy doesn’t shake O’Neill’s faith in the bobbing “straw” of hopefulness that might rescue him and the other drowning souls he’d met. “It is for this reason,” Barrett Clark wrote of The Straw, “that I have always considered O’Neill at bottom an optimist. He never leaves us feeling that life is not worth living. If he were as pessimistic as he is often said to be, in the first place he would not have gone to the trouble of trying to prove the futility of existence.”³²⁴ When Ed Keefe, O’Neill’s friend from New London, wrote to say how much he enjoyed the play in New London, and O’Neill responded that he’d hoped to make the opening but hadn’t been able to: “It was a rather hectic, nerve-wracking time for me,” he said, though he thought it amusing that The Straw opened in New London since “there is so much autobiographical stuff in it connected with that town.”³²⁵ What O’Neill failed to say was that the concurrent productions weren’t the only issues wracking his nerves that fall.

The previous August 1921, Kathleen Jenkins’s lawyer had notified O’Neill that she expected him to finance their son’s education. O’Neill agreed to pay $800 the first year, $900 the next, and then $1,000 each year thereafter until Eugene Jr. turned twenty-one. After eleven years, Jenkins also believed that Eugene was old enough to reveal to him the identity of his true father—the famous playwright Eugene O’Neill. Hearing this, the boy desperately wanted to meet him. O’Neill was apprehensive, though not averse to the idea (no diapers, less milk). As he’d written at the time in The First Man, Curtis Jayson (O’Neill) would be able to embrace fatherhood only once the newborn is “old enough to know and love a big, free life” (CP2, 116).

That fall, Kathleen’s mother Kate accompanied Eugene Jr. to the lobby of O’Neill’s apartment building at 36 West Thirty-Fifth Street. Kenneth Macgowan stood at O’Neill’s side to help out if the meeting took an awkward turn. In fact, according to Jenkins afterward, “They hit it off so well” she felt she was losing her son’s allegiance to her ex-husband.326 Father and son were both great baseball fans and connected strongly with that, most likely discussing the relative merits of the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. (O’Neill, it must be said, was a Yankees fan.)³²⁷

Surprisingly, O’Neill and Jenkins appear to have gotten back in touch much earlier than has previously been thought. On January 14, 1919, when O’Neill was commuting from West Point Pleasant to Macdougal Street and back, he sent his ex-wife a lengthy, amiable letter from New York. Written in pencil and warmly signed “Gene,” a sign-off reserved only for his closest friends and relations, this tightly written eight-page communiqué is now presumably secure in private hands. Sotheby Parke-Bernet, a highly reputable auction house, sold this missing document to an unknown buyer in 1977. Its catalogue of sales describes the letter in startling terms, especially given it’s been widely assumed they’d cut off all correspondence: “Unusually fine long early letter, full of information on his activities in the theater, the last page on social and family matters, with a loving conclusion.”³²⁸ (Jenkins’s later discretion over the letter’s existence in some ways parallels Boulton’s decades later regarding Exorcism.) At the time O’Neill wrote this, he’d achieved neither fame nor fortune. But by the summer of 1921, when Jenkins requested money, he had both. O’Neill agreed to pay for Eugene’s education, was granted visitation rights, and invited his son out to Peaked Hill for the following summer.

“Better luck next time!” O’Neill yawped in a letter to George Tyler after learning that The Straw had closed in New York after less than three weeks; but he expressed his abiding appreciation for Tyler’s courage in backing his “hopeless hope.” He wrote Saxe Commins that he wasn’t sure why The Straw had shut down before Saxe had time to attend it: “Everyone was afraid they’d catch T.B. by entering the theatre, I guess.”329 But again, O’Neill brushed aside the failure. In a 1948 interview with the New Yorker, he borrows a line from The Straw from three decades earlier: “When everybody likes something, watch out!”³³⁰ In the play, Eileen Carmody tells Stephen Murray that “everybody” at the sanatorium has read his stories and “thinks they’re fine.” “Then [the stories] must be rotten,” he replies with a smile (CP1, 784).

Over the holiday season, 1921–22, O’Neill granted an interview to Malcolm Mollan, the city desk editor from his New London Telegraph days, now a struggling freelancer, who’d threatened to fire him if he showed up drunk again. “Are you our foremost apostle of woe?” Mollan asked mischievously. “Many say you are.” O’Neill grinned. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “there’s Volstead.” “You’ll grant, I suppose,” Mollan went on, “that there are interesting situations in life, even dramatic situations, out of which genuine happiness sometimes ensues?” “Sure, I’ll write about happiness,” came the reply, “if I ever happen to meet up with that luxury, and find it sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life. But happiness is a word. What does it mean? Exaltation: an intensified feeling of the significant worth of man’s being and becoming? Well, if it means that—and not a mere smirking contentment with one’s lot—I know there is more of it in one real tragedy than in all the happy-ending plays ever written.”³³¹

Mollan pressed O’Neill to clarify his apparent attempt to reform American society through drama. “I am not a propagandist,” he responded, “not consciously, at any rate—in any sense of the word. … I have tried to keep my work free from all moral attitudinizing. To me there are no good people or bad people, just people. The same with deeds. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are stupidities, as misleading and out-worn fetishes as Brutus Jones’s silver bullet.”³³² Much of this outlook was derived from Max Stirner, who proposed that good and evil are mere fantasies, since one can murder freely so long as it’s sanctioned by the state, which makes “morality nothing else than loyalty.” O’Neill’s views on morality, what would be called “moral relativism” today, also came from August Strindberg, who argued that to compose a believable fictional character demands roundness not just of personality, the simpler definition of strong characterization, but also of morality: “There is no such thing as absolute evil,” Strindberg wrote, “the summary judgments that authors pass on people—this one is stupid, that one brutal, this one jealous, that one mean—ought to be challenged by naturalists, who know how richly complicated the soul is, and who are aware that ‘vice’ has a reverse side, which is very much like virtue.”333 In kind, O’Neill never considered himself or his plays as “immoral,” he said, but rather “unmoral.”³³⁴

A later friend of O’Neill’s, the drama critic Sophus Winther, called this in 1934 a “naturalistic ethics” (also akin to the moral relativism of today). “If no one is to blame,” he wrote of O’Neill’s plays, “then moral certainty cannot exist.” Naturalistic ethics are therefore untethered by the petty notions of good and evil one finds in melodrama; rather, they give the lie to society’s ever-changing standards of morality. As early as 1914, in Abortion, O’Neill had already spelled out this worldview: “Some impulses are stronger than we are,” his protagonist Jack Townshend says to his father, “have proved themselves so throughout our world’s history. Is it not rather our ideals of conduct, of Right and Wrong, our ethics, which are unnatural and monstrously distorted? Is society not suffering from a case of the evil eye which sees evil where there is none?” (CP1, 213). Winther concludes by noting that O’Neill thus pushed society’s laws “even further in that he condemns a fixed standard as destructive of life, holding that in the last analysis it will lead to false pride, arrogant and cruel behavior, hypocrisy and a destructive fanaticism.”³³⁵

In 1957, Tennessee Williams echoed this with his own naturalistic ethics: “I don’t believe in ‘original sin,’” he wrote. “I don’t believe in ‘guilt.’ I don’t believe in villains or heroes—only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.” In simpler terms, as O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, later remarked on this same point, “Gene was never shocked at what people did. He was only interested in why they did it.”³³⁶ After ten days of shepherding “Anna Christie” and The Straw onto uptown stages, O’Neill’s artistic muse had withered out of commission, and he returned to Provincetown for a an indefinite period of recovery from “the after-effects of much bad booze.” “After all the worry and bustle of rehearsals, openings, I’m all in—very much of a nervous wreck—and glad to be back up here where no one can talk theatre to me. For the nonce, I’m fed up on that subject.”337

“I am in one of my periods of uncreative doldrums,” he told Arthur Hopkins’s press agent Oliver M. Sayler. “Read only the papers and the Saturday Evening Post, think not at all, walk much, and for emotional reaction have only a great and self-blighting loathing for the world in general. But these moods of the great loathing never last very long with me when the dunes are within walking distance, and I hope to report to you in my next that I am fully resurrected.”³³⁸

Less than a week later, O’Neill reported that his “creative élan” had been “fully resurrected,” and he’d begun writing his next play, The Hairy Ape, “with a mad rush”: “Think I have got the swing of what I want to catch and, if I have, I ought to tear through it like a dose of salts. It is one of those plays where the word ‘inspiration’ has some point—that is, you either have the rhythm or you haven’t, and if you have you can ride it, and if not, you’re dead.” The Hairy Ape’s protagonist Robert “Yank” Smith is also, like Driscoll in the Glencairn plays, based on O’Neill’s old drinking partner and fellow sailor on the S.S. Philadelphia. Driscoll, O’Neill said, “committed suicide by jumping overboard in mid-ocean.” Why would such a “tough customer” do something like that? “It was the why of Driscoll’s suicide that gave me the germ of the idea.” The rough draft was done in three weeks, “without interruption save for writer’s cramp.”³³⁹

The First Man was scheduled to open at the Neighborhood Playhouse on March 4, five days before The Hairy Ape at the Provincetown Playhouse. This was just as well. O’Neill admitted that he wished he’d destroyed The First Man, and The Hairy Ape offered diverting cover. Even George Jean Nathan tore The First Man apart: “Eugene O’Neill’s new drama, ‘The First Man,’” Nathan wrote, “is the poorest full-length play that he has written. While not without certain minor merits, it discloses its distinguished author in a tedious and profitless vein, with all of his most obvious faults magnified and with his sardonic point of view trembling perilously at the brink of burlesque.”340 “You let it down too easy,” O’Neill told him. “It is no good.”³⁴¹

The Hairy Ape, on the other hand, was a masterwork of avant-garde theater. O’Neill wrote a gushing note about the play to Kenneth Macgowan immediately upon completing it in early January 1922: “I don’t think the play as a whole can be fitted into any of the current ‘isms.’ It seems to run the whole gamut from extreme naturalism to extreme expressionism—with more of the latter than the former. I have tried to dig deep in it, to probe in the shadows of the soul of man bewildered by the disharmony of his primitive pride and individualism at war with the mechanistic development of society. And the man in the case is not an Irishman, as I at first intended, but, more fittingly, an American—a New York tough of the toughs, a product of the waterfront turned stoker—a type of mind, if you could call it that, which I know extremely well. … Suffice it for me to add, the treatment of all the sets should be expressionistic, I think.” O’Neill’s patchwork of dialects, his unique blending of “isms,” his terrifying indictment of the industrial world order, made The Hairy Ape seem to many as if it had been written a century ahead of schedule. The Hairy Ape, Macgowan declared after witnessing its opening night that March at the Provincetown Playhouse, “leaps out at you from the future.”³⁴²