From the Provincetown Players’ earliest stage, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce’s cottage during the summer of 1915, to their breakup at the Macdougal Street theater in 1922, the amateur drama group produced an astonishing ninety-seven original plays by forty-six playwrights, all but two of them American. The foundation had been set for serious American drama on a mass scale. The triumph of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape in 1922 and the Pulitzer Prize awarded to “Anna Christie” that same year would galvanize, just as the Players predicted, a theatrical revolution in the United States. Although the majority of the many hundreds of new American plays to follow replicated the naturalism of “Anna Christie,” it was The Hairy Ape, with its groundbreaking blend of naturalism and expressionism, what O’Neill called “super-naturalism,” that would prove to have the longest lasting impact.

“The greatest day of the Provincetown Players was between 1919 and 1922,” Mary Heaton Vorse declared. “A great contribution was made then to the American stage.” The pioneering novelist John Dos Passos agreed: in his provocative 1925 essay “Is the ‘Realistic’ Theatre Obsolete?” Dos Passos warned that if theater was to survive as an art form, it must progress in the ways O’Neill had shown in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. Dos Passos declared that “the throb of the drum in The Emperor Jones cleared many a pair of ears that had been until that time tuned only to suburban comedy. The chesty roar of The Hairy Ape made several people forget to read how The Well Dressed Man would wear his cravat.”

A year after the Players’ historic finale in 1922, O’Neill would join forces with Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones to form a new production team: the Experimental Theatre, Inc. At the same time, the American Laboratory Theatre was established, producing such theatrical luminaries as Harold Clurman and Lee Strasburg. (Strasburg’s Group Theatre would subsequently introduce “method acting” to the American stage in 1931.) By the mid-1920s, moreover, “The Great White Way” was no longer the enemy of serious drama. The number of new Broadway productions had more than doubled since the 1915–16 season, just one year before the opening of the Playwrights’ Theatre and the New York debuts of O’Neill and Glaspell. To this day, the 1925–26 season remains the historical peak of Broadway activity, with a staggering 255 new productions. (The 2013–14 Broadway season, in comparison, had 44.) The previously despised Shubert Brothers—the owners, in fact, of the Plymouth Theatre, where The Hairy Ape would achieve its success—were no longer reviled out of hand as lording over a greedy syndicate of philistines and knaves working at cross-purposes with risky innovation. Now they were behind-the-scenes allies striving, in their fashion, to help usher in this increasingly sought after New American Drama.

O’Neill and the Theatre Guild, formerly the Washington Square Players, even got over their mutual aversion in time. The Guild had begun to produce cutting-edge American dramatists like Elmer Rice, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard, DuBose Heyward, and others, and in 1928, it accepted its first O’Neill plays, Marco Millions and Strange Interlude; the latter would earn O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize. O’Neill’s most accomplished work of this period, Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1927), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), embodied the blend of naturalism and expressionism that came to dominate twentieth-century drama, what has since become known as the “American Style.”

ACT III: The Broadway Show Shop

It is too soon yet to be committed about O’Neill, though young as he is, he is already a quantity to make one wonder at the truth of the above assertion.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER, 1922

I question the moon above Broadway, “Where do I get off at? Where do I fit in?”

—EUGENE O’NEILL, 1926

Prometheus Unbound

WHEN O’NEILL read The Hairy Ape out loud to the Players gathered at the Macdougal Street theater, he did so without performance or embellishment. After the last line, though, he stood up, faced the group, and shouted, “This is one the bastards [uptown] can’t do!” The Players, stunned by the play’s bold originality, cheered in agreement. What they didn’t yet know was that O’Neill had already begun courting the uptown producer Arthur Hopkins to produce it before the script was even ready for the Players. He sent copies to both in the same mail—a detail the press agent Oliver M. Sayler publicized, to O’Neill’s embarrassment, in the New York World. “Oliver, as a friend I love you as a brother,” O’Neill berated him gently, “but as a publicity man … you must know what an utterly depraved, conscienceless character you are in that role.”1

The Emperor Jones’s breakout success signaled both the overture of experimental American drama and the coda for the Provincetown Players. Back when Saxe Commins had been drilling and bridging and extracting away inside O’Neill’s mouth, in April 1921, Boulton, in a chat with Jig Cook in Provincetown, learned of his intention to build a theater exclusively for O’Neill, Glaspell, and a couple of others he’d cultivated. She reminded him that new O’Neill plays now had uptown draw. “If we have this theater,” Cook rejoined, “will Gene want any of his work done uptown? I think Gene sees by this time that the uptown commercial game is no good. … I think Gene will want us to do all his plays.” “Now,” Boulton wrote her husband that same day, “do you, or don’t you, think it rather presumptuous on Jig’s part to feel that when they have this new theatre, which will seat 299 people, that they can count on the pick of your work?”2

Boulton’s response to the exasperated Cook might have struck him as Lady Macbeth–like, but he knew it was well founded: O’Neill’s move uptown was an inevitability. That February 1922, O’Neill, Cook, Glaspell, Fitzie Fitzgerald, Cleon Throckmorton, and Edna Kenton convened a secret meeting with their attorney Harry Weinberger to decide, once and for all, whether to disband. The vote was unanimous: “We would call in some outside director and new actors from somewhere, and call it the end,” Kenton said. “All this we did.”³ On February 24, they legally incorporated the Provincetown Players, holding onto the name and the theater but with no plan for the future. They wouldn’t make the announcement of their breakup until season’s end, until after they’d produced what they all knew would be their crowning achievement, O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape.

The Hairy Ape consists, like its precursor The Emperor Jones, of eight scenes. The first four take place on an ocean liner and the second four in Manhattan while the protagonist, Robert “Yank” Smith, a coal stoker on the steamship, is on shore leave. Yank proclaims that industrial technology is the future, where he “belongs,” a word, with variations for parts of speech, used over forty times in the play. O’Neill’s subtitle, “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,” accurately describes the play insofar as “ancient” refers, in part, to Greek tragedy: Yank is a “tragic hero” figure of the Greek tradition, doomed by hubris, or unwarranted and excessive pride. The subtitle also harks back to our Darwinian ancestry, just three years before the infamous Scopes “Monkey” trial in which a Tennessee high school teacher would be indicted for teaching the theory of evolution. That O’Neill regards The Hairy Ape as a “comedy” seems like morbid irony; its meaning, however, can be found in the “happy ending” of Yank’s doom, since death provides his sole escape from the cages thrown up around him by modern times.

Yank’s overblown sense of belonging rapidly deflates when a wealthy young woman slumming in the stokehole, Mildred Douglas, faints after witnessing his grotesque behavior. Before losing consciousness, Mildred utters, “Filthy beast,” though Yank’s shipmates remember it later as “hairy ape,” an insult that tears Yank’s confidence apart. He then embarks on an existential quest to “belong” that ends at the gorilla cage of the city zoo. At first Yank feels as if, with this caged primate, he might at last have found a place where he belongs; recognizing his mistake, he says to the gorilla, “I ain’t on oith and I ain’t in heaven, get me? I’m in the middle tryin’ to separate ’em, takin’ all de woist punches from bot’ of ’em. Maybe dat’s what dey call hell, huh? But you, yuh’re at de bottom. You belong! Sure! Yuh’re de on’y one in de woild dat does, yuh lucky stiff!” (CP2, 162). Yank mistakes the gorilla’s alternating growls, roars, and cage rattling for fraternal sympathy and jimmies open the lock, whereupon the great ape slowly exits his cage. Yank holds out his hand to shake on their allegiance, but the gorilla lunges and crushes him with a “murderous hug.” He then flings Yank’s body into the cage, shuts the door, and wanders off. “Perhaps,” O’Neill writes in the final line of his stage directions, it’s only in death that “the Hairy Ape at last belongs” (CP2, 163).

The Hairy Ape’s premiere on March 9, 1922, was a widely hailed victory in the press, most amusingly wrought by critic Arthur Pollock in his rhapsodic write-up for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “We didn’t learn anything at all in high school, but the only thing we regret not having learned is a knowledge of how to make ear-splitting noises with two fingers in the mouth. … The accomplishment would have been so useful a thing the other night at the opening of Eugene G. O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape.’ … It was the best play by an American we have ever seen. The audience shouted at the end. Some of the auditors whistled. But they weren’t very good at it. We wanted to try the two finger noise, tried it and failed. Which was humiliating. And there wasn’t a critic present who could do it. Critics are a limited crew.”4 Notices like these poured in, though not all were as unequivocal as Pollock’s. Much of the chatter revolved around the style of the play and its origins. The critics had heard of European expressionism, but not many had actually witnessed it aside from The Emperor Jones (which few at the time identified as expressionism) and the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (1909), which had just been translated into English and produced by the Theatre Guild the previous summer.

“It isn’t Expressionism,” O’Neill explained. “It isn’t Naturalism. It is a blend—and, as far as my knowledge goes—a uniquely successful one.” O’Neill was thus moved to invented an “ism” of his own, “super-naturalism,” or rather, he co-opted the term from Theodore Dreiser’s Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916), a collection meant to reveal, in the novelist’s words, “the inscrutability of life and its forces and its accidents.”⁵ O’Neill would also come to borrow this language from Dreiser several years later in his explanation to his first biographer, Barrett Clark, telling him that his overall goal was to reveal through writing the “inscrutable forces behind life.”⁶

O’Neill had nevertheless instructed the Players that the set designs “must be in the Expressionistic method,” and Bobby Jones and Cleon Throckmorton accepted his challenge with extraordinary ingenuity. For one thing, they made Cook’s dome once again earn its keep: Alexander Woollcott, writing for the New York Times, applauded the designers of what he considered (although he was frequently critical of O’Neill’s plays) “one of the real events of the year.” They’d transformed, he said, by means of the dome “that preposterous little theatre … one of the most cramped stages New York has ever known [and created] the illusion of vast spaces and endless perspectives.” “In that tiny space,” wrote Robert Benchley in Life, “are produced scenic effects which make those of up-town theatres appear like something you might do in the barn.” Benchley advised his readers “to see ‘The Hairy Ape’ before it moves up-town (as it unquestionably must), for Jones and Throckmorton have achieved a focus with their effects on this miniature stage which may be lost or diffused in a larger and more commercial theatre.”7

The casting for Yank Smith had been critical to the play’s success, of course. Yank is arguably the most demanding role in O’Neill’s repertoire: his emotional transitions are erratic; his monologues numerous and lengthy and must be performed with a pitch-perfect Brooklyn accent; his appearance is that of a Neanderthal, though he’s capable of projecting deep introspection (he’s often required to pose in the seated position of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker). The choice was simple: before O’Neill had written a word of the play, he’d already pegged Louis Wolheim, known to friends as “Wolly,” a close friend and associate of the celebrated actors John and Lionel Barrymore. O’Neill took one look at this hulking ex-football player, most likely for the first time at one of the Barrymores’ legendary parties, with a face that looked as if it had been pulverized with a croquet mallet and knew immediately that he’d found his leading man.⁸

Wolheim’s moving portrayal of Yank, like Charles Gilpin’s of Brutus Jones, catapulted the actor from near obscurity into the limelight. Wolheim was a natural for the part because, again like Gilpin with Jones, he regularly associated with people like Yank and could handily reproduce the Brooklyn workingman’s persona. The strong box office returns were attributable as much to theatergoers wishing to see Wolheim as Yank Smith as to see the acclaimed new play by Eugene O’Neill. Mary Blair, on the other hand, who’d played the leads in Before Breakfast and Diff’rent, was a dubious choice for Mildred; from the outset it was clear that the otherwise brilliant actress was the production’s weakest link. Mildred must be an anemic, artificial-looking by-product of wealth. Blair, Arthur Hopkins said, was too vibrant a personality to render this effectively.⁹ When the Players moved uptown, Blair was replaced by a far better choice, Carlotta Monterey, an older but stunningly beautiful performer with a natural hauteur that embodied the part. (O’Neill ignored her at their first meeting, a slight he wouldn’t live down when they met again four years later.)

One night after a performance, O’Neill, Wolheim, Light, Fitzgerald, and a few others met at the Samovar for an after party. They spoke with elation about each of their roles in the production but also about the theatrical revolution The Hairy Ape was sure to set in motion. Wolheim pronounced that Yank Smith’s lines were not just dialogue but real poetry, especially in that one scene. “What scene?” O’Neill asked. And there was Yank, conjured from the air and sprawled out on the restaurant floor, roaring out his final lines at the zoo in Brooklynese. Someone at an adjoining table snickered, and Wolheim fell silent. Then Yank was back, leaping at the offender with a roar—the Hairy Ape in the flesh, unencumbered by the stage. Just as instantly, Wolheim was “Wolly” once again and calmly returned to the table. The Players often retold this anecdote to friends and colleagues, seeing in it, they would say, “an instant of unlimited possibilities.”10

Carlotta Monterey and Louis Wolheim in the 1922 Broadway production of The Hairy Ape.

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

Wolheim’s loutish stage presence belied a fact about the actor that might have surprised his uptown audiences: along with his acting ability, he was endowed with a keen intellect. An avid bibliophile, Wolheim had graduated from Cornell University, where he’d received an undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he was nearly fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish. As such, Wolheim found himself beleaguered by the same question from those who knew him about The Hairy Ape: “What does it mean?” “People are always trying to find hidden meanings,” he averred, “when the truth is knocking at their door.” “An individual throws himself headlong against an impregnable system, and in the struggle inevitably and dramatically perishes. The system carries on unchanged. … A man attacks a false god. He fights with mighty strength, with bitter fury. Again and again with despair in his rudimentary soul he throws himself on the image. At last he lies a broken mass at the feet of the god. He has beaten his life out. The god is unchanged.”11

As a dramatist, Wolheim declared, O’Neill “has no axe to grind, no propaganda to promote, no psychoanalysis complex to unravel”; but each of his characters nonetheless “express[es] a deep resentment against our present civilization.” In this way, he said, the playwright “resembles Tolstoy, but he is without the latter’s naïve religious faith. A fighting Tolstoy—that is O’Neill.” O’Neill must be welcomed, he concluded, as “the Prometheus of modern drama.” “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it on man. For this offense the gods had him chained to a rock and an eagle tortured him with beak and talons. … The mantle of Prometheus has fallen on Eugene O’Neill.”¹² A couple of years on, O’Neill made it clear that he shared Wolheim’s analogy about himself, though he replaced Prometheus’s eagle with a flock of mangling vultures:

My vultures are still flapping around, thank God, hungry and undismayed; and I am very proud of them for they are my test and my self-justification. I would feel a success and a total loss if they should ever desert me to gorge themselves fat and comforted on what the newspaper boys naively call fame. But luckily they are birds that fly from the great dark behind and inside and not from the bright lights without. Each visit they wax stranger and more pitiless—which is, naturally, a matter of boast between them and me!—and I look forward to some last visit when their wings will blot out the sky and they’ll wrench the last of my liver out; and then I predict they’ll turn out to be angels of some God or other who have given me in exchange the germ of a soul.13

O’Neill had been in no mood to celebrate The Hairy Ape’s opening night on March 9 with a “John Barleycorn party” at Christine Ell’s restaurant. He didn’t go to Macdougal Street that night at all. Back in December 1921, he’d been told that Ella and Jim O’Neill were traveling to California for six months to sort out some real estate holdings of James’s outside Los Angeles. Ella had remained socially aloof after conquering her addiction; but after James’s death, she discovered that she was adept at managing her deceased husband’s financial affairs. Also thanks to Ella, her son Jim had, remarkably, stayed on the wagon for a year and a half. O’Neill felt obligated to spend Christmas in New York with them, though he’d been in the midst of writing The Hairy Ape and grumbled about the “risk of breaking this mood up.”¹⁴ If he made the trip, and there’s some doubt about whether he did, he kept his presence in New York a close secret. One hopes he did visit Ella, as this would have been his last opportunity to see his mother alive.

Ella was hospitalized with a stroke that February, and Jim wired O’Neill, pleading with his brother to take a train out. O’Neill replied that a specialist had warned that he’d surely have a “nervous collapse” if he undertook such a journey in his “present condition.” (O’Neill was actually in reasonable health but was in the process of directing the most ambitious play of his life.) “Be fair. … Would not help Mother or you? Also you wire she is unconscious, will not know me. Want to help in any possible way. Everything I have at your command. Wire me what and how. … My plans depend on health. Would leave immediately if able. You must accept truth. I am in terrible shape.”¹⁵

Ella O’Neill died eight days later, on February 28, 1922.

The First Man premiered at the Neighborhood Playhouse on the sleety, bitter-cold night of March 4, 1922. Earlier that same day, Jim climbed aboard the eastbound train toting ten bottles of whiskey to escort Ella’s remains back to New York.¹⁶ Jim arrived at Grand Central Station with Ella’s casket on the day of The Hairy Ape’s premiere, and he was definitively off the wagon—this time for good.

O’Neill received Jim’s wire from Los Angeles on March 4 that he and Ella’s body would arrive in New York by train five days later. He then contacted his father’s friend and longtime advance man William Connor to accompany him to the station and help make arrangements for Ella’s casket and funeral. But, at the last minute, O’Neill backed out, just as he had on the street corner while heading with Boulton and Dorothy Day to Lou Holladay’s body at the Samovar. Perhaps the horror of watching first his friend and then his father die had convinced O’Neill that he was unfit for the emotional hell that direct exposure to a loved one’s death entails. Whatever his state of mind, he phoned Connor to say he wasn’t going.

Connor received this news with disgust but reluctantly enlisted his nephew, Frank Wilder, to replace the absentee son. At Grand Central, Connor and Wilder oversaw the porters’ removal of Ella’s casket and placement on a luggage cart on the platform. Jim was nowhere to be seen, but they eventually tracked him down in his compartment, incoherent and surrounded by empty whiskey bottles. They loaded Jim into a taxi and checked him into a Times Square hotel, then Connor phoned O’Neill at his suite at the Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. O’Neill had shamefully failed in his duty to his mother, and Connor let him know it.17

A few minutes before midnight, Boulton and Commins returned to the Netherland after attending the premiere of The Hairy Ape. According to Commins, he called O’Neill’s room from the lobby to let him know they were coming up but was told to wait downstairs. Stepping off the elevator, O’Neill looked terrible: his face was ashen gray and his lips “two lines of blue.” “A tremor shook his body and he seemed to have lost control of his hands.” He could barely speak, as if his words “scraped past a rough lump in his throat.”¹⁸ Too humiliated to admit the truth, O’Neill lied by omission, leaving the impression that he’d been to Grand Central for his mother. He asked Boulton to go up to the suite without him and left with Commins for a walk, first around the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then across Central Park.

For a half hour O’Neill didn’t utter a word while Commins prattled on about The Hairy Ape’s triumphant debut: when the final curtain fell just an hour before, he said, the audience members leapt to their feet. Wolheim got a standing ovation, and the packed auditorium echoed with cries of “Author! Author!” Their shouts carried on after the lights went up; but once they’d begun to realize that O’Neill was not going to appear, they slowly headed for the exit, glancing over their shoulders in eagerness for a last-minute entrance of the ingenious creator of this remarkable new play. “For Christ’s sake, cut it!” O’Neill snapped. “I don’t give a damn.”19

Commins pressed on, bursting to relive the experience, if only for himself. He described the audience’s gasps of astonishment when actual fire burst out of Jones and Throckmorton’s furnaces in the stokehole scene, the innumerable curtain calls for the cast members, the praise he and Boulton overheard from audience members between scenes and outside on Macdougal Street after the show. “I might have been talking to myself,” he later recalled. “If he had heard anything I had been saying, it meant as little to him as the other night noises in the park.”²⁰

“It doesn’t mean anything,” O’Neill said, though not, Commins realized, in response to what he’d been telling him about the premiere. “It doesn’t mean anything,” O’Neill repeated. Then he started talking about his family. He began incoherently, stammering with his usual stand-alone words and half-finished sentences. He talked about his mother, her convent school days in Indiana and, in Commins’s words, her “sheltered, innocent” life before joining the vagabond lifestyle of her husband, “the antithesis of everything she had ever known.” He talked about how Monte Cristo had been “the dominant factor in their lives; they were chained to it”; about how his mother endured, year after year, “the agonies of one-night stands, the shabby accommodations and the improvised food of theatrical hotels”; about how their summers in New London provided her with much-needed but unsatisfying breathing space between tours; about how his father had frittered away the family’s aggregate wealth with “wildcat mine stocks and even wilder real-estate gambles.” “Imagine!” O’Neill said of James’s role as Edmund Dantès. “He played that part more than six thousand times, no wonder it made an addict out of her.”21

The air was frigid and damp in Central Park, and Ella’s funeral had been scheduled for the next morning. Commins broke O’Neill’s trancelike state several times, urging that they return to their hotels and get to bed. “Stay with me,” O’Neill responded each time. His soliloquy then turned to Jim, or rather on Jim, and his incredible potential, squandered on booze and prostitutes and gambling—the climax of his tragic existence being the disgraceful night of drunkenness at the train station earlier that day. By then, Commins remembered, his halting speech had disappeared: “Jim could have been a fine writer, a poet and certainly a barbed satirist or a romantic actor in the best tradition or even, highest in Gene’s esteem, a clear and persuasive thinker. But no, Jim was too bedazzled by Broadway, by round-heeled women, by his autointoxication with his own boasting while his sycophants urged him on. … If only he, Gene, had Jim’s gifts, then perhaps the O’Neills might be redeemed from the father who allowed himself to be trapped by success. The old man was a Sisyphus and Monte Cristo was the stone he was condemned to push uphill into hell.”²²

Back at the hotel around four in the morning, the two men exchanged an awkward embrace, and Commins left O’Neill alone in the lobby. As well as helping his friend through this difficult night, Commins had also, though neither of them could have known it at the time, listened to O’Neill sketch out the thematic contours of what would become, two decades later, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Ella’s funeral service was held a few hours later at St. Leo’s Church, where Ella had attended Mass when she’d stayed at the Prince George Hotel. O’Neill and Boulton were at the service, which was conducted by Father Fogarty, a classmate of O’Neill’s from St. Aloysius. His childhood nurse Sarah Sandy was there too, but he avoided her, though this was the last time they would see each other.²³ Later that afternoon, O’Neill and Boulton took a train up to New London to bury his mother in the family plot with James and Edmund in St. Mary’s Cemetery. Jim, no longer the loyal presence he’d been when James passed, hadn’t shown up for any of it.

On the night of The Hairy Ape’s opening at the Shubert Brothers’ Plymouth Theatre on April 17, the first thing the rowdy crew of Hudson Dusters would have seen was their friend’s name glowing in electric lights on the marquee. This must have impressed them. That’s where the star’s name usually went, rarely if ever the playwright’s.24 O’Neill had invited them himself, and once they’d taken their balcony seats, they started feeling rambunctious and would soon let loose during the pivotal third scene, when Mildred encounters Yank in the stokehole.

Jones and Throckmorton’s set design for scene 3 stunningly evoked the volcanic representation of Dante’s inferno that O’Neill specifies in his stage directions: “The fiery light floods over their shoulders as they bend round for the coal. Rivulets of sooty sweat have traced maps on their backs. The enlarged muscles form bunches of high light and shadow” (CP2, 135–36). The firemen work in unison, savagely, ritualistically. Now and then a whistle sounds, signaling the men to shovel faster so the engines can pick up steam. Yank goads the workers to follow his own backbreaking pace. Mildred enters behind him, just at the moment when the whistle blows once too often, and Yank “brandishes his shovel murderously over his head in one hand, pounding on his chest gorilla-like,” and roars at the top of his lungs, “Come down outa dere, yuh yellow, brass-buttoned, Belfast bum, yuh! Come down and I’ll knock yer brains out! Yuh lousy, stinkin,’ yellow mut of a Catholic moiderin’ bastard!” (CP2, 137).

The Hudson Dusters went wild in the balcony, erupting into hoots and whistles and cheers, shocking the respectable uptown audience in the orchestra seats below.²⁵ Along with a propensity for two-fisted drinking, the gangsters shared O’Neill’s Irish pride, and scene 3 in the play has the distinction of being the only one in which, before his encounter with Mildred, Yank allies himself with a group: the Catholics of Belfast. Belfast was the steamship-building capital of the world, where the Titanic was built. To Yank, the officers are Protestant, “Catholic moiderin’ bastards,” and the Dusters may well have received their tickets from the playwright the night before as they celebrated the anniversary of the Easter Rising of April 16, 1916.

On December 6, 1921, the Irish Free State was formed, ending the two-year Irish War of Independence—the very week O’Neill recovered his “creative élan” and had begun composing The Hairy Ape “with a mad rush.” Of course, six of Ireland’s traditional thirty-two counties had remained part of Great Britain, as Northern Ireland, and many irredentist Catholics and Protestants loyal to Great Britain alike ignored the ceasefire and continued fighting through the spring of 1922, the violence mostly concentrated in the north. Given the torrent of dialogue that gushes from Yank’s mouth over the first three scenes, it’s more than likely O’Neill had tipped the Dusters off ahead of time to listen for the line—even more, perhaps, for the satisfaction of disrupting an evening at an uptown theater than the desire to make a political statement.

O’Neill also dedicated a scene to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or “Wobblies,” as the radical labor union members were then called, and a number of them attended the play as well. O’Neill portrays the Wobblies at their waterfront headquarters at 9 South Street as staid and bureaucratic, juxtaposed against Yank’s imposing ferociousness. In the previous scene, scene 6, Yank had overheard the union men described as a “devil’s brew of rascals, jailbirds, murderers and cutthroats” (CP2, 152). Since the American press had already printed this overblown portrait of the labor organization, O’Neill counters the accepted stereotype by making the IWW scene, paradoxically for middle-class audience members at the time, the only realistic scene in the play. (In fact, the play’s original iteration, the short story “The Hairy Ape,” though rejected by Metropolitan magazine in 1918, had ended with Yank joining the IWW.)26

“[O’Neill] has found a cause and he has become a propagandist,” smirked Heywood Broun, now unrivaled among O’Neill’s most adversarial critics. This time Mike Gold stood up to defend O’Neill against Broun’s attacks. With The Hairy Ape, Gold said, O’Neill had ushered onto the boards “that deep spirit of revolt that burns even in the American working-man, even in the callous-handed citizens of the richest country in the world.”27

The Wobblies, like the Dusters with the reference to Ireland’s troubles, greeted The Hairy Ape with cheers for attempting, they said, to “explode the popular misconception of the I.W.W. as a bomb-throwing organization—an idea especially prevalent among the limousine class of theatergoers, who are now having it dislodged from their minds.” “[O’Neill] understands us,” wrote a port delegate of the Wobblies’ New York division. “Even the spies that the detective agencies sometimes got into the organization,” said another, “know better than to think that the I.W.W. preaches violence.” The delegate wrote a review for the union-run Marine Worker applauding the play’s veracity: “Most books and plays of the sea leave the real seaman with a bad taste in his mouth and much disgust in his heart. Very different is ‘The Hairy Ape,’ written by an old time seaman Eugene O’Neill. … This play, which every seaman should attend, catches the exact spirit of … the forecastle and spreads a flow of language which takes the breath away from the wearers of dress satin and evening gowns. The throb of the engines, the whir of the propeller, the whistle of the wind through the rigging, and the choicest kind of cursing are all there and true to the life of the sea.” “It’s good to hear from someone who knows what he is talking about that my ‘Hairy Ape’ rings true,” O’Neill responded in a letter to the Marine Worker. “I wish there were more of the critics who were familiar enough with the life and background of the play to be able to give it a hearing for what it is, and not what they guess it is.”²⁸

That June 1922, O’Neill and every member of The Hairy Ape cast and crew signed a petition to President Harding urging him to free, without the humiliation required for individual pardons, ninety-six IWW prisoners at Leavenworth Penitentiary who’d been arrested under the Espionage Act for conspiring to obstruct America’s entry into World War I.²⁹ (Harding paroled three of the political prisoners on the condition that he could send them back at his discretion. In August 1923, Harding died suddenly in office, and by Christmas, his successor, Calvin Coolidge, had granted amnesty to them all.) This heated political climate had earlier gotten the Players into the same trouble with Sunday performances as they’d had with The Emperor Jones. “For a performance or two,” said Kenneth Macgowan, “getting by the plain clothes men at the door was harder than getting a passport.”30 It was a female undercover cop, Officer Anna Green, who paid for a membership to attend the show on Sunday evening, March 12.

New York’s prosecuting attorney argued that the idea of the playhouse as a private club was “merely a subterfuge for the sale of tickets in violation” of the penal code forbidding Sunday theatricals. After hearing the testimonies of Fitzie Fitzgerald and O’Neill’s lawyer Harry Weinberger, Magistrate Simpson publicly disagreed. While approvingly reading an article quoting Simpson, O’Neill took out his pencil and underlined what he considered the key points: “The Provincetown Players is an organization that is a credit to the community. It has encouraged native drama and has the support and approval of influential citizens. It would be a calamity to interfere with or hamper the work of this club. It is a boon to those practicing the art of the drama and acting who have no other place to turn to for original experiments.”³¹

But the New York Police Department wasn’t yet finished with the thirty-three-year-old playwright. A Lieutenant Duffy attended The Hairy Ape at the Plymouth that May, then submitted a report to Chief Magistrate William McAdoo confirming that the drama was “obscene, indecent and impure.” McAdoo then requested a copy of the script from Arthur Hopkins’s office. After giving it a once-over, he sent it back with no comment. McAdoo believed (not unjustifiably) that Hopkins had sent a bogus “concerned citizen” to police headquarters to file a complaint that the play was “immoral and unfit for the eyes and ears of New York theatre-goers” in hopes of boosting sales and publicity. Within the week, O’Neill noted with satisfaction, the bid for suppression had worked against itself: “As for the attempt to suppress ‘The Hairy Ape,’ it simply reacted against the people who started it, as the sale of seats to the play went up with a bang. And, in another way, it has been a very good thing—I feel that it has dealt a decided blow at state censorship.” The next night, in fact, the performance sold out and advance sales skyrocketed. The New York World telegrammed O’Neill in Provincetown for comment: “Such an idiotic attempt at suppression,” he responded with brusque finality, “will bring only ridicule on the poor dolts who started it.”32

New York Herald critic Lawrence Reamer caviled that by scene 4 of The Hairy Ape, “the air is growing pretty thick with blasphemy.” He looked forward to its print publication so he might count precisely how many times O’Neill used the word “Christ” in vain (it’s eight). But the play’s relatively mild language—“Christ,” “tart,” “boob,” “damn,” “tripe,” and so on—was inconsequential, argued David Karsner, a left-wing columnist for the socialist newspaper the New York Call, compared to O’Neill’s blistering critique of the American way of life. Karsner insisted it wasn’t “the choicest kind of cursing” that attracted the censors, as the more priggish critics assumed and the police at first charged. The Hairy Ape hit audiences on a deeper level than that: “It carries a text and a message that is outlawed in this country, and it proclaims an abiding and everlasting hatred and contempt for the law as it is made and enforced, for the church as it apologizes for the greed of its rich patrons, for the press as it lies and misrepresents, for the state as it censors and suppresses the natural impulses of clean beings, and for all other manifold evidences of hypocrisy and cant with which our people are so sweetly and securely endowed. … And through this medley of derision those in that part of the audience who believe in things as they are are made to feel somewhat insecure in the permanency of their faith.”³³ Two years later, on April 22, 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover took over as acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, he heard O’Neill’s subversive dog whistle against the “American way” loud and clear. The Bureau’s memorandum on O’Neill shows that he was now under investigation for treason, and it warned that The Hairy Ape “possesses inferential grounds for radical theories.”³⁴

That May 1922, Columbia University announced that “Anna Christie” had won O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize. The selection once again met with a churlish response from his detractors in the press, and for the same objection raised two years earlier with Beyond the Horizon: the Pulitzer was meant for the play “best representing the educational value of the stage in raising the standards of good morals, good taste and good manners.” “[Anna Christie] goes over her training period in a brothel,” fumed Billboard critic Patterson James. “She swallows drink after drink and smokes cigaret after cigaret. All in the interest of good morals?”35 O’Neill reveled in this surge of notoriety, one that invariably follows when the world of fine arts and the world of law enforcement reflexively operate in tandem—the former with a mix of applause and outrage, the latter with ham-fisted investigations and threats of obscenity charges. “Yes, I seem to be becoming the Prize Pup of Playwrighting, the Hot Dog of the Drama,” he laughed. “When the Police Dept. isn’t pinning the Obscenity Medal on my Hairy Ape chest, why then it’s Columbia adorning the brazen bosom of Anna with the Cross of Purity.”³⁶

Meanwhile, amid the commotion over O’Neill’s latest triumph, an unyielding wedge had been driven between Cook’s “way of the group” philosophy of theater and the expansive ambitions of other Provincetown Players like O’Neill, Fitzie Fitzgerald, Bobby Jones, Cleon Throckmorton, and Jimmy Light. Cook’s grandiloquence had, quite simply, lost its inspirational appeal on the heels of their uptown success. “Our playwrights outgrew the home nest,” Fitzgerald said, making instant enemies of Kenton and Glaspell, who after this pegged her as a traitor. But Fitzgerald responded to the disbandment of the Players with assurances that their revolutionary mission would carry on to the commercial stage: “Their plays demanded better stages, better productions, than we could give them. Both plays and actors needed the advantages of larger audiences than the faithful old stable could house.”³⁷

Glaspell and Cook departed for Greece in early March, the week before The Hairy Ape’s opening night. The Hairy Ape’s playbill lists Cook as director, apparently as a parting gesture of respect, though he and Glaspell were halfway across the Atlantic before the dress rehearsals had even begun. Consternation had spread over who would direct if not Cook; but by mid-February, O’Neill wrote Saxe Commins that he’d been doing “most of the directing.” Light was listed as the play’s stage manager, and he sat devotedly at O’Neill’s side during rehearsals as well. (Anticipating the move uptown, Arthur Hopkins also offered directorial advice and financing when necessary.)³⁸ Glaspell’s Chains of Dew followed The Hairy Ape on the next bill. This three-act comedy, Kenton admitted, “was not good—none knew it better than [Glaspell]. But we foresaw that The Ape would go uptown, taking with it most of our players. Certainly by now it had become an honor higher to go than to stay.” (Glaspell would go on to win the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison’s House.) Cook and O’Neill each thought the other had let them down. “Our richest, like our poorest,” Cook opined, “have desired not to give life but to have it given to them,” while O’Neill wrote Fitzgerald that “primarily, as you undoubtedly will agree, it is all Jig’s fault. As I look back on it now, I can see where he drove all our best talent, that we had developed, away from the theatre for daring to disagree with him—this in a supposed group democracy! Then beat it to Greece leaving a hollow shell as a monument to his egotism.”39 Cook would never return to New York. He succumbed to typhus at Delphi less than two years later and was buried in a tomb respectfully adorned with a stone from the Temple of Apollo.

Over the summer of 1922, Cook mailed off several drunken letters denouncing his former associates for selling out to the “quicksand of commercial New York.” “I do not see how Gene could possibly permit this,” he wrote to Kenton. “Edna, I vomit.”⁴⁰ Just after Cook cabled to agree to the legal termination of the Players, a personal letter arrived at the theater lamenting what he regarded as a collective defeat: “I am forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and death, in an alien sea, a coral island of our own, has failed. … What one who loved it wishes for it now is euthanasia—a swift and painless death. We keep our promise; we give this theatre we love good death. The Provincetown Players end their story here.”⁴¹

Draining Bitter Cups

Eugene O’Neill Jr., now twelve years old, was scheduled to visit Provincetown in the summer of 1922. “I want to have an opportunity to get to know him,” O’Neill told Kathleen Jenkins, “to convince him that I am his friend as well as his father.” Eugene arrived early that August and stayed for three weeks of sunbathing and picnicking in the dunes, splashing in the surf with his little half brother, Shane, and generally making a fine impression for his newfound family. Even Jim O’Neill, by this time determined to drink himself into oblivion, trekked out to Cape Cod to make the acquaintance of his nephew. O’Neill admired the boy’s precocious intelligence and was secretly pleased that he was a troublemaker at school, just as he himself had been.42 That summer, father and son forged a genuine and lasting bond, a mutual admiration that would carry over into Eugene’s adulthood, and that Shane, much as he longed to, would never achieve.

When Eugene Jr. left to go back to his mother, O’Neill gave himself entirely over to drink. His behavior that summer was outrageous, and he was, by most accounts, a nasty drunk. One night he showed up at a costume party, darkly tanned as usual, wearing nothing but a leopard-skin loincloth and an orange fright wig. A Boston journalist, believing his tan was makeup, wiped a piece of paper against his arm, hoping to take the illustrious smudge back home as a unique souvenir of the playwright. O’Neill glared down at her, then dealt a merciless blow that sent her flying across the room. Bobby Jones, who visited that summer, informed Mabel Dodge that both O’Neill and Boulton had been “rendered entirely will-less by liquor.” Not much of a drinker himself, Jones witnessed some of his colleague’s worst binges yet. One night when Terry Carlin was present, O’Neill urinated into a bottle of whiskey and then drank from it. “I worship the O’Neills,” Jones admitted, despite the crass behavior. “They are the noblest spirits there are … [but] they know nothing about anything except suffering and hell generally.”⁴³

That November O’Neill and Boulton packed up Shane and Fifine Clark, or “Gaga,” as Shane had come to call his stalwart nanny, and relocated the family to a thirty-acre estate known as Brook Farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The property consisted of acres of woodland, an old apple orchard, two ponds, and an expansive lawn dotted with elms and maples. Ridgefield was an easier commute to New York than Provincetown, but the manor house that came with the property was ill suited to the O’Neills. Terry Carlin inhabited the attic for a time, and O’Neill felt more at ease up there jawing with the old anarchist than anywhere else in the house.⁴⁴ Brook Farm’s twelve rooms lacked furniture and other amenities, making its enormity doubly daunting and expensive. More to the point, its stately grandeur reflected the kind of complacent, gentrified existence that, philosophically at least, O’Neill and Boulton abhorred. O’Neill rationalized its expense as a worthy investment, and it spared them from living in hotels, the demoralizing theatrical lifestyle of his itinerant father and mother. When guests arrived, the O’Neills were determined to make it seem, if only in outward appearance, that they had a real home.⁴⁵

Eugene O’Neill adorned with seaweed outside Peaked Hill Bar.

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

Brook Farm in 1922.

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

Nine original O’Neill plays had appeared on Broadway in just two years, an astonishing run. He also received a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters that winter, and his plays were becoming known in Europe. Macgowan and Jones had gone to Germany the previous summer to drum up producers for O’Neill’s plays, and they’d induced one in Berlin to put on “Anna Christie.” (This was postwar Germany, a defeated nation in financial ruin; for the rights to his play, O’Neill received 7,840,000,000 marks, or $1.39.) By February O’Neill had completed his three-act play Welded, a histrionic account of his tumultuous marriage to Boulton. It was a good time to take stock of their relationship. “You know,” he told Kenneth Macgowan during one of his visits to Brook Farm, “I don’t really like Agnes.” Macgowan winced. “That seemed to me stronger somehow,” he said afterward, “than if he’d said he hated her.”46

The couple’s frequent skirmishes that winter, 1922–23, escalated into outright warfare. O’Neill began accusing Boulton of having or at the very least desiring to have affairs. It was the indisputable nadir of O’Neill’s decades-long battle with alcoholism, and in the aftermath of his most abusive episodes, O’Neill would guiltily confess to his wife, according to her, that he’d come to believe that “marriage is a gotdamn thing. You become part of another person, the two of you become one person, and it’s frightening. When you realize that you start trying to beat your way out.” “Then the horrible thing happened,” reported Boulton’s would-be chronicler Max Wylie about an episode she would relate to him personally. “After a lot of unprovoked abuse, [O’Neill] suddenly snatched up a large stack of papers and flung them into the fire. And she knew what he was doing to her: he was burning up her novel! She fought and screamed, but he was too strong for her. He held her until it seemed quite consumed. Then he left.”⁴⁷

On another occasion, O’Neill cut up photographs of Boulton, then proceeded to maul irreparably what Boulton considered her “greatest treasure”—a portrait of her father, Teddy Boulton, by the renowned painter, and Teddy’s mentor at the Arts Students’ League of Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins. (Teddy and Eakins, among other collaborations, had cast Walt Whitman’s death mask in 1892.) An early snow had just begun to fall that November 1922, as Boulton and Shane were returning home.⁴⁸ As the two of them proceeded up the walk, Boulton told Wylie, O’Neill “burst out the front door in a rage, full of his seafaring profanity.” He was obviously drunk, so she ignored him; but while putting Shane to bed, she heard from downstairs “the most awful clattering and banging, and a chair turned over.” Then the front door slammed, and from Shane’s window Boulton saw her husband “rubbing something in the snow.”

I was still upstairs when a horrifying thought struck me. I couldn’t credit my own suspicion. I whirled down the stairs, looking up over the mantel. Father’s portrait was not there. Gene was trying to smear off the face in the snow. I ran out but it was too late. The paint was so hard set it wouldn’t smear, and on this fence post he was mercilessly shredding the canvas, banging it up and down till it was a mass of tattered ribbons. … Gene knew I loved this portrait more than anything we’d ever had in our home. … Gene knew how to hurt me. He knew how to hurt everybody. I think he was hurting so much inside himself, that periodically he had to lash out. After such enormities, he was so contrite, he was embarrassing to be around. … If he hadn’t had his plays in which to play out his principal hatreds, I feel very sure he’d have found his way to an asylum before he was thirty.49

Boulton’s telling of this ghastly “enormity” has been met with deserved skepticism.⁵⁰ Wylie, who related the incident, has elsewhere been proven unreliable; Boulton also contradicted the account in a different interview, saying that O’Neill destroyed the portrait while she was away on a visit to New York.⁵¹ It’s therefore been an open question whether Eakins had painted a portrait of Boulton’s father at all. In terms of its existence and destruction, Boulton wasn’t confabulating.

Thomas Eakins’s painting was a small, ten-by-fourteen-inch portrait of Teddy’s head. Teddy’s friend Frances J. Ziegler, also a student of Eakins’s, recalled that Teddy adored the portrait, refusing to sell it even though he was very poor.⁵² Agnes Boulton held onto the savaged remnants until at least 1931, at which time she informed Eakins’s biographer Lloyd Goodrich that the picture was “badly injured, so much so that I doubt it can ever be restored.”⁵³ Another Eakins portrait of Teddy has survived (and for the first time is published here).⁵⁴

The stranglehold that alcoholism had taken over O’Neill by the early 1920s is nearly impossible to overstate. Though it’s often been said that once O’Neill finished a play, he would go on a binge, during this period it was precisely the reverse: O’Neill would stop binging just long enough to write a play.55 During this first winter at Brook Farm, O’Neill became so unwound that he appears to have even broken his rule to abstain from drink while writing. “I don’t think anything worth reading was ever written by anyone who was drunk or even half-drunk when he wrote it,” he told Barrett Clark. “The legend that I wrote my plays when I was drunk is absurd,” he went on. “It was when I was not writing that I drank. I’d drink for a month and then go out and snap out of it by myself. It was during these periods that I wrote.” Welded was almost certainly an exception; but either way, drunk or sober, the script reveals two profoundly fragile egos, and Boulton verified that its fictional marriage was a “carbon copy” of their own.⁵⁶

A sketch of Theodore “Teddy” Boulton by Thomas Eakins. Another portrait of Teddy Boulton by Eakins was destroyed by O’Neill in a drunken rage at Brook Farm.

(COURTESY OF THE WILLIAM INNES HOMER PAPERS, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, NEWARK)

Welded, in O’Neill’s words, depicts “a man and woman, lovers and married, [who] enact their spiritual struggle to possess one the other. I wanted to give the impression of the world shut out, just of two human beings struggling to break through an inner darkness.”⁵⁷ The principals are Michael Cape, a playwright, and his wife, Eleanor, an actress. The couple has been married, like O’Neill and Boulton, for five years. Eleanor looks just like Boulton: tall, with high cheekbones and a mass of dark hair.⁵⁸ Michael is nothing less than his creator’s reflection; this is, revealingly, O’Neill on O’Neill: “His unusual face is a harrowed battlefield of super-sensitiveness, the features at war with one another—the forehead of a thinker, the eyes of a dreamer, the nose and mouth of a sensualist. One feels a powerful imagination tinged with somber sadness—a driving force which can be sympathetic and cruel at the same time. There is something tortured about him—a passionate tension, a self-protecting, arrogant defiance of life and his own weakness, a deep need for love as a faith in which to relax” (CP2, 235).

Over the course of the play, Michael arrives at the revelation that a perfect union is an unreasonable goal, that love and strife go hand in hand, particularly when embodied by two such passionate, artistic-minded individuals as himself and Eleanor. Michael receives this life-altering vision on life and love from a highly improbable source, a streetwalker channeling the marital advice of Friedrich Nietzsche: “You got to laugh, ain’t you?” the prostitute advises Michael about his life’s seemingly intolerable agonies. “You got to loin to like it!” (CP2, 267).

O’Neill derived many of his views on women from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a cult classic of early existentialist thought. “This book,” Boulton said, “had more influence on Gene than any other single book he ever read. It was a sort of Bible to him, and he kept it by his bedside in later years as others might that sacred book.” Nietzsche, she added, “at the time moved his emotion rather than his mind.”59 O’Neill’s destitute emotional health that winter, and the play it gave impetus to, points to one of Nietzsche’s chapters in particular: “Child and Marriage.” The individualist “Superman” Zarathustra preaches to a spellbound acolyte that “even your best love is only an enraptured simile and a painful ardor. It is a torch to light you to loftier paths for you. Over and beyond yourselves you shall love one day. Thus learn first to love. And for that you had to drain the bitter cup of your love. Bitterness is in the cup even of the best love: thus doth it cause longing for the Superman.”⁶⁰ O’Neill doubtless took Welded’s working title, “Made in Heaven” (as in “a match made in heaven”) from this chapter as well, since it’s there we find Zarathustra sneering at the treacly cliché.⁶¹ After his evening with the prostitute, Michael returns home to Eleanor, and his monologue indicates that O’Neill himself had accepted Nietzsche’s dictum that no marriage is made in heaven. But he adds the intrinsically sadomasochistic line that in the coming years, “we’ll torture and tear, and clutch for each other’s souls!—fight—fail and hate again … but!—fail with pride—with joy!” (CP2, 275).

O’Neill and Boulton did strive to keep their marriage intact over the coming years, and would have another child; but their efforts ultimately failed with neither pride nor joy. The rest of O’Neill’s prophecy held true. In his heartrending breakup letter to Boulton, he told her that their bond had been hopelessly undermined by “moments of a very horrible hate [that] have been more and more apparent, a poisonous bitterness and resentment, a cruel desire to wound, rage and frustration and revenge. This has killed our chance for happiness together. There have been too many insults to pride and self-respect, too many torturing scenes that one may forgive but which something in one cannot forget.” Known as O’Neill’s “I love you, I hate you” play, Welded is built upon these “torturing scenes.” O’Neill inscribed Boulton’s copy with Michael Cape’s closing plea to Eleanor: “I love you! Forgive me all I’ve ever done, all I’ll ever do.”62

Moving in with his brother’s family at Brook Farm was never an option for Jim O’Neill. His famous sibling could neither write nor maintain any semblance of sobriety with him around. Jim had also come to detest Boulton, believing that she’d turned his brother against him. (Boulton, he thought, resented him after he’d been bequeathed sole ownership of some property James had owned in Glendale, California.) Harold de Polo invited him to stay at his house in nearby Darien, Connecticut, a favor that de Polo and his wife Helen almost immediately came to regret. “He had the wittiest, most ruthless tongue I ever knew,” de Polo remembered of Jim’s insufferable disposition when drunk. “He’d find out your weaknesses and play on them all night. The next morning he couldn’t remember what he’d done and would ask, ‘Was I terrible?’ ‘Yes, you were.’ ‘Christ! It’s the old spirit of the perverse in me again.’” Jim’s ruthless tongue wasn’t his only threat to their peace of mind. One night when de Polo was out of town, Jim was smoking a cigarette in bed and accidentally set his mattress on fire; but as he was too inebriated to do anything about it, Helen de Polo had to drag the burning hulk outside herself.63

O’Neill had just added the finishing touches on Welded when he was informed that his brother had been nearly arrested, on February 16, 1923, in Stamford, Connecticut, at a performance of “Anna Christie.” “Stinko profundo,” as usual, Jim had abruptly leapt to his feet in mid-performance and bellowed, “Why shouldn’t my brother, the author, know all about whores!” The actors fell silent and peered out into the dark auditorium. As if trying to steal the limelight while his younger brother Gene was—yet again—the center of attention, Jim then screamed that Agnes Boulton was a whore and, turning to Helen de Polo, rounded off his trade by calling her one too. De Polo put an end to Jim’s outburst by roughly escorting him out of the theater and onto a train to New London. After O’Neill got off the phone with de Polo, O’Neill wired the family’s estate attorney, C. Hadley Hull, about his brother’s “most disgraceful scene” at Stamford: “Any measures however drastic you see fit to take to restrain him in New London will have my full approval.”⁶⁴

The O’Neills returned to Peaked Hill Bar that summer just before Jim checked into a mental asylum in Norwich, Connecticut. Word around New London had it that he’d been forcibly hauled off in a straitjacket. By August, O’Neill wrote Saxe Commins from Provincetown that although his older brother had been released from the asylum, he soon after went “nuts complete” and was now incarcerated in another sanitarium. This was Riverlawn in Paterson, New Jersey, where Jim regained his sanity but wallowed in the throes of “alcoholic neuritis.” He’d also gone nearly blind from the Prohibition rotgut he’d been swilling by the gallon, and the Riverlawn doctors informed O’Neill that Jim would be lucky to recover 50 percent of his eyesight. “What the hell can be done about him is more than I can figure,” O’Neill wrote Commins. “He’ll only get drunk again, I guess, after he gets out and then he’ll be all blind.”⁶⁵

Jim had fouled up their family estate too while under the sway of a notorious pair of gamblers he hung around with in New London. Hadley Hull had warned O’Neill about Jim’s association with the swindlers back in mid-November. At first, O’Neill ignored the lawyer’s pleas to intervene; when he responded a month later, he made some petty excuses, then gave up and confessed, “I don’t know what to say … It seems there is nothing I can do about it. The last I heard of him he was in pretty bad shape. In New York, he phoned to me, but I have not seen him. … And I have learned by experience that the more I should urge him toward one course of action, the more obstinate and determined he will be to do the opposite. So what can I do?”66

James O’Neill Jr. died from alcoholism on November 8, 1923, at first with a stroke, then arteriosclerosis and cerebral apoplexy. As a result, O’Neill inherited $140,000,the lion’s share of which was caught up in devalued real estate and outstanding legal and administrative fees.⁶⁷ But on the same day Jim had died, his “Frankenstein,” as Jamie Tyrone calls his brother Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, had embarked on a serious bender of his own.

O’Neill’s latest spree was instigated by a weekend visit from the writer Malcolm Cowley, his wife, Peggy Baird, and the poet Hart Crane. O’Neill and Cowley knew each other peripherally from the Village, when Cowley had played a black ghost in The Emperor Jones and a white ghost in a revival of Where the Cross Is Made. “Then Gene stopped writing plays with ghosts in them and my stage career came to an end,” Cowley joked later. “It was a minor example of how his decisions affected all of us.”⁶⁸ O’Neill was deeply interested in Crane’s poetry and invited him to Brook Farm after meeting him in New York the week before. (Crane wouldn’t find out until later that O’Neill considered him at the time the finest poet in America.)⁶⁹ O’Neill was only thirty-five, though his dark hair had a premature fringe of gray around the ears; yet Cowley already thought of himself and Crane as emissaries to the old guard from the upcoming literary generation.

Cowley’s party was met at the train station by the O’Neills’ chauffeur, Vincent Bedini. Arriving at Brook Farm, they were greeted at the door by a Japanese butler named Kawa and Finn Mac Cool, a massive Irish wolfhound “the size of a three-month-old calf,” that O’Neill had named for a warrior of Irish legend.⁷⁰ O’Neill was on the wagon, and to the disappointment of his parched young guests, no alcohol was served at dinner. He explained that he was working on a play about New England (Desire Under the Elms) but didn’t want to discuss it further until he was finished.

On Saturday night, O’Neill ushered Cowley and Crane down to the cellar, “the only part of the house,” Cowley thought to himself, “that seems to arouse his pride of ownership.” The playwright motioned into the darkness at a rack of three fifty-gallon casks of cider that Bedini had distilled using apples from their private orchard: hard cider, “the Wine of the Puritans.” “Let’s broach a cask,” Crane suggested. At this, O’Neill became visibly agitated and said he was worried Bedini wouldn’t approve because the cider hadn’t properly fermented. Cowley knew something about cider distillation and convinced his host that early batches often turn out best. Stripped of resolve, O’Neill mounted the stairs to the kitchen and returned to the cellar with a pitcher and three glasses. “Gene takes a sip of cider,” Cowley remembered, “holds it in his mouth apprehensively, gives his glass a gloomy look, then empties the glass in two nervous swallows.”71

The next day, Boulton drove off with Cowley, Baird, and Crane to a friend’s house in Woodstock, New York, and by the time she’d returned, O’Neill was gone. A week’s time passed after his first glass of cider before she found him in a room above the Hell Hole and there informed him of Jim’s death. Though Jim had turned sour toward Boulton, she’d dutifully made the arrangements for his casket, funeral service, and burial. Pleading a hangover, just as Jim had with their mother’s funeral the year before, O’Neill refused to make an appearance at his brother’s sparsely attended funeral on Twenty-Eighth Street. Nor was he present when Jim was buried beside their father, mother, and brother in the family plot.

“It was a shame,” O’Neill wrote a schoolmate later. “[Jim] and I were terribly close to each other, but after my mother’s death in 1922 he gave up all hold on life and simply wanted to die as soon as possible. He had never found his place. He had never belonged. I hope like my ‘Hairy Ape’ he does now.” In this way, Jim’s death led to a kind of catharsis; but it also left O’Neill feeling terribly alone: “I have lost my Father, Mother and only brother within the past four years,” he wrote his Gaylord Farm nurse Mary Clark. “Now I’m the only O’Neill of our branch left. But I’ve two sons to ‘carry on.’ However, neither of them will be pure Irish, so I must consider myself the real last one.”72

Back in the spring of 1922, after the Provincetown Players had silently disbanded, O’Neill, Kenneth Macgowan, and Robert Edmond Jones resolved to form a new kind of experimental theater. For one thing, O’Neill insisted that the old model of a communal theater should be thrown out entirely. Macgowan, he said, “ought to be absolute head with an absolute veto. To hell with democracy!” Bobby Jones would design the sets and direct, and O’Neill would write plays, supervise the productions, and make artistic policy. Fitzie Fitzgerald was hired as their business manager,⁷³ Jimmy Light as stage manager, and Cleon Throckmorton would continue his work alongside Jones as technical director.⁷⁴ They signed the lease to take over the Macdougal Street theater, now officially the Provincetown Playhouse, in the summer of 1923, but only with incontrovertible assurance that the Players never reorganize. Macgowan wanted to co-opt the name Provincetown Players, but O’Neill stridently rebuffed the idea. “I won’t be mixed up in any organization which has to straddle the old and new,” he warned his friend. “Make it an entirely fresh effort! To hell with the old name! Any name will do if you’ve got the stuff.”⁷⁵

The unexpected death of Jig Cook on January 14, 1924, was followed closely by an acrimonious letter from Susan Glaspell to Macdougal Street demanding that the name “Provincetown Playhouse” be replaced. The internecine war among the former Players had already been ignited in the summer of 1922 by Cook, who considered the hangers-on a voracious flock of “carrion crows after the sweet stink of that carcass.” “Bide time on Gene,” he’d instructed Kenton. “His mood toward us was bad. It is up to him to come to us again—if he needs us. He ought sometime to see a light about [Arthur] Hopkins and us—but he may never see.”⁷⁶

After hearing of Glaspell’s appeal to preserve the Provincetown name for Cook’s legacy alone, O’Neill informed Kenton that he’d argued for that but was outvoted; he then wrote a separate letter to Glaspell, one of the few women among the Greenwich Village crowd whom he considered “a real person”:77 “When I heard of [Jig’s] death, Susan, I felt suddenly that I had lost one of the best friends I had ever had or ever would have. … I’m sure if Jig can look into the hearts and minds of Bobby, Kenneth, and me he sees an integrity toward the creation of beauty in this theatre with which he can be content.” In an unexpected but welcome letter from Greece, Glaspell reassured him that she understood his good intentions for the theater. Her onetime protégé responded with elation that he and Boulton “read and reread” her letter. “It made us feel close to you,” O’Neill wrote with sincere gratitude, “and we love you so much Susan.”⁷⁸ Fitzie Fitzgerald, on the other hand, received another sort of letter from Glaspell, this one defending Kenton for fighting to preserve the name for Cook’s legacy, and she ended with bitter certitude: “Fitzie, and all of you, for this letter is for all of you, from very deep down, I am through.”⁷⁹

Over the following decades, O’Neill time and again acknowledged the “tremendous lot” he owed the Provincetown Players, if with some qualifications. “I can’t honestly say I would not have gone on writing plays if it hadn’t been for them,” he said. “I had already gone too far ever to quit.” Edna Kenton agreed, but only in hindsight and with a sternly worded but indisputable codicil: “There is no doubt at all that had he not had our Playwrights’ Theatre and our experimental stage to use always precisely as he wished to use them, he would have reached Broadway by quite another road and with quite other plays. … No other American playwright has ever had such prolonged preliminary freedom with stage and audience alike.”⁸⁰

On January 3, 1924, the Provincetown Playhouse reopened its old stable doors, with a fresh coat of paint, an enlarged stage, and newly built proscenium entrances. Their manifesto, written by O’Neill and published in their first playbill, declared that “the difficult is properly our special task—or we have no reason for existing. Truth, in theatre as in life, is eternally difficult, just as the easy is the everlasting lie.” The newly formed Provincetown group would maintain a strict code of artistic integrity, but Jig Cook’s days of idealistic amateurism, O’Neill now decreed, were over.

Instead, the spirit of professionalism had taken hold: they now welcomed critics and hired a press agent, Stella Hanau. “The premières had some of the glitter of uptown openings,” Hanau said, “and those who remembered the early days eyed the limousines and the top hats with amazement faintly touched with disapproval.”81 Though most of them used the metonymy “the Provincetown,” they still didn’t have an official name. “We are just a theatre,” O’Neill said. “Beyond that, let what we do give us a name.” O’Neill, Macgowan, and Jones soon adopted one based on an article by Boulton in Theatre Arts magazine that announced their arrival and defined their mission with two unambiguous words: “Experimental Theatre.” Thus when the three men incorporated, they called the group the Experimental Theatre, Inc. (ETI). In due course, the press conferred a more portentous label: “The Triumvirate of Greenwich Village.”⁸²

O’Neill had suggested August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata (1907) for their debut. The Swedish dramatist, O’Neill contended in his program note, “remains the most modern of moderns, the greatest interpreter in the theatre of the characteristic spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama—the blood—of our lives today.” Also at O’Neill’s behest, they chose to reinterpret Strindberg’s “chamber play” (a three-act work with minimal cast and props) using self-crafted masks. O’Neill had deployed masks before in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape; but in Jones it was just the African mask for the witch doctor, and in The Hairy Ape the costume designer Blanche Hays had thrown together masks at the last minute for background characters. Jimmy Light, who designed the masks for Spook Sonata, boasted that before this landmark production, “no one had used the mask” in modern drama “as the focus of dramatic action.”⁸³

Light explained that prior to this, the mask in modern theater had “disappeared along with other fundamental tools of the theatre, such as the aside, the soliloquy, the prologue, and the epilogue.” In his profoundly illuminating but as yet unpublished reminiscence of his time with O’Neill, “The Parade of Masks,” he stresses that Spook Sonata’s qualified success was less important to the playwright than its “demonstration of the possibilities of the mask.” “It was ‘Expressionism,’ though not pushed to the point at which the physical setting,” in the mode of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, “takes on the anthropomorphical shape of the dramatic conflict.” O’Neill realized that the mask, rather than merely “an archaeological feature of classical theatre,” as it had been widely regarded, could be a powerful “tool for the exposition of emotional conflict in plays dealing with man as he is today.” “However, the actor has no manner or means by which he could change the rigid places and lines of the mask. It is we, the spectators, who living the past experience of the character and undergoing the immediate agony, place kinesthetically, our emotions on the face of the mask. They are our emotions.”84

O’Neill’s dramatic arrangement of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on April 6, 1924. For this play O’Neill was determined, as he’d been from the start, to heighten his audience’s sense of “identification,” a term that Light defined as the “memory and emotional resources of the spectator” informing a character’s inner self. Once audience members ceased to rely on the personality-tainted expressions of an actor (particularly those of the “hams” of the day), they might encounter a far more intimate and interactive theater than the superficial, passive entertainment they were accustomed to.⁸⁵ Even revivals of classics like Hamlet, O’Neill argued as late as 1932, would do well to make use of masks: “Masks would liberate [Hamlet] from its present confining status as exclusively a ‘star vehicle.’ We would be able … to identify ourselves with the figure of Hamlet as a symbolic projection of a fate that is in each of us, instead of merely watching a star giving us his version of a great acting role.” “From the standpoint of future American culture,” O’Neill wrote, “I am hoping for added imaginative scope for the audience, a chance for a public I know is growing yearly more numerous and more hungry in its spiritual need to participate in imaginative interpretations of life rather than merely identify itself with faithful surface resemblances of living.”⁸⁶

Heywood Broun regarded Jimmy Light’s mask designs as “cadaverous and ghastly” and the experiment on the whole an “abject failure … a cracked test tube in the Provincetown laboratory.” Other reviewers were on less sure footing, and most agreed that Teddy Ballantine’s haunting recitation of Coleridge was magnificent. Even a mystified Broun reported that when the curtain fell, the little theater shook with applause. “Special students of the stage will find in new productions of the Provincetown Playhouse much to study and discuss,” wrote critic Robert Gilbert Welsh. “The ideas expressed are not likely to appeal to the general public—yet!”87

O’Neill’s first original play in nearly two years, Welded, premiered uptown at the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre a few weeks earlier on March 17. The play was directed by Stark Young but overseen by the Triumvirate and designed by Bobby Jones. Its run was a meager twenty-four nights, and the reviews were abysmal, often derisively so: “Climax after climax goes by,” scoffed E. W. Osborn of the New York Evening World, “at each of which one can imagine a well-trained curtain fairly aching to drop.” “Indeed, if the program had not indicated positively that the whole action of the play transpires within a six-hour period,” groaned Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “the audience would have been justified in regarding it as much longer.”⁸⁸

At one performance, the actress Doris Keane, who starred as Eleanor Cape, overheard an audience member grumble about Jacob Ben-Ami, who played Michael, “If that fellow says [‘I love you’] again, I’ll throw a chair at him.” The audience was also laughing at inappropriate times, at first guiltily, then uproariously, and the Billboard’s critic guessed why: “It is an axiom that repetition, if continued long enough, will result in laughter. A well-known example is that of the old vaudeville gag, ‘I’m going away—but before I go I have something to say. I’m going away—but before I go I have something to say.’ Repeat this long enough and the audience will laugh, tho there is nothing intrinsically funny in the words or thought themselves. Mr. O’Neill has his couple alternating between the themes of ‘I love you’ and ‘I hate you’ far too long.” Edna Kenton, enjoying a moment of schadenfreude, gossiped to novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten that she’d overheard a friend of O’Neill’s sigh over the humiliating laughter made worse by the excruciatingly personal dialogue. “He has torn out his heart and put it on his sleeve for stupid peckers to peck at,” the person said. “I suppose it was something he must do.”89

After the bad notices began pouring in, O’Neill complained privately to its director, Stark Young, about the distinction between the modern actors of the 1920s and the romantic actors of his father’s generation: “Here’s just the difference: the actors those days would not have understood my play but they could act it; now they understand it but can’t act it.” In public, however, O’Neill and Macgowan admitted a major blunder they’d recognized during rehearsals but too late to do anything about it: Jones’s set of the Capes’ Manhattan duplex was magnificently rendered but far too realistic for a “super-natural” play. “The creative mind does not always see clearly what it is doing,” Macgowan said in a Vogue “review” that really amounted to a public apology. “It would have been far better if he had provided nothing but dark curtains and stabbing shafts of light and a few chairs.” It should only have been done at Macdougal Street in the experimental way, he concluded. “It was our error—O’Neill’s and Jones’s and mine—that we chose to mount it on Broadway.” “I wanted to give the impression of the world shut out, just of two human beings struggling to break through an inner darkness,” O’Neill told the New York Times. “But the sets which I described in my stage directions were so ‘natural’ that they inevitably conjured up all the unimportant paraphernalia of daily living, daily existence, to stand between the life of my characters and the lives in the audience.”⁹⁰

Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the May 15 premiere of O’Neill’s next Macdougal Street production, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, the playwright inadvertently found himself at the center of a racially charged firestorm of his own making. First commissioned as a one-act by George Jean Nathan for his American Mercury magazine, All God’s Chillun swelled into a two-act, seven-scene play that expressionistically delves into the torments of a mixed-race marriage. Macgowan reported that over the weeks after its publication, the mailman nearly broke his back lugging shoeboxes overflowing with press clippings to the upstairs office. The clipping bureau also nearly broke the theater’s bank, since the price for the service was $50 per one thousand clippings. (The clippings, he complained, wound up costing them more than the scenery.) “What with the weekly syndicate letters and dispatches from Cape Town, Sydney, and Calcutta,” Macgowan said, “it is no risk at all to say that ‘All God’s Chillun’ received more publicity before production than any play in the history of the American theatre, possibly of the world.”91

Note to the Ku Klux Klan

Alarmed citizens from all walks of life, racist, religious, and progressive reformers alike, discharged an unending flood of rage upon the Provincetown Playhouse in the late winter and early spring of 1924. Every book club, college library, and gardening society printed diatribes about All God’s Chillun Got Wings. “It seemed for a time there,” O’Neill told a classmate about the indignation that the news of the production inflamed, “as if all the feeble-witted both in and out of the K.K.K. were hurling newspaper bricks in my direction, not to speak of the anonymous letters which ranged from those of infuriated Irish Catholics who threatened to pull my ears off as a disgrace to their race and religion, to those of equally infuriated Nordic Kluxers who knew that I had Negro blood, or else was a Jewish pervert masquerading under a Christian name in order to do subversive propaganda for the Pope! This sounds like burlesque but the letters were more so.”⁹²

The NAACP also received letters about the pending production in Greenwich Village, from those sympathetic to O’Neill to those prepared to drive African Americans off the continent if it were to appear: “The furor of intolerance that is being raised against O’Neill’s play is so absurd,” wrote one of the former. “White and colored people do occasionally get married, so why should not a serious dramatist use that phase of our national life as material for a big play.” Another, scribbled in black crayon, is addressed to “Nigger Johnson” (an allusion to the African American boxing champion Jack Johnson, who had married a white woman) and signed “white man.” The play, “white man” wrote, was exclusively designed to “help the black bastards to get what was in their rotten hearts for years.” He alleged that the leading lady Mary Blair was a mulatto, “not white,” and that for race relations in America, “this play is going to spoil everything. America is not for niggers—you shines belong in Africa. Bring on the Riot—that’s what we want.”93

Jimmy Light, who was directing the play, told a reporter that he’d been “accused of being a Jew hiding under an English Christian name, and O’Neill was called a dirty Irish Mick.” Another of their correspondents considered O’Neill “so low he’d have to take a stepladder to get up to a cockroach.” Light neglected to mention the masses of Victorian ladies, one hundred thousand in number, who, through their representatives in the City Federation of Women’s Clubs of New York, unanimously passed a resolution condemning the playwright for inflicting upon New York “this unwholesome, revolting and disgusting exhibition of what Mr. O’Neill regards as art.”⁹⁴

The main cause of this uproar? The press had made a shocking discovery, circulated nationwide, that in the upcoming O’Neill production on Macdougal Street, a white actress, Mary Blair, would kiss the hand of her black leading man, Paul Robeson, live on stage.

All God’s Chillun Got Wings treats the unlikely relationship between an educated African American man, Jim Harris, and a working-class Irish American woman, Ella Downey, from their preadolescent days as childhood sweethearts to their tumultuous marriage. Through the course of the play, Jim, a hardworking student, attempts to pass the American Bar Association exam; but he repeatedly fails it as a result of his low self-esteem, which he attributes to being intimidated by the white test takers in the examination room. His failure is also due in large part to the fact that Ella, at first incongruously, makes every effort to thwart his dream. This interracial union, divisive for both black and white audiences of the early twentieth century, ultimately destroys Jim’s professional ambitions and sends Ella spiraling into murderous racist pathology.

The idea had been percolating for a couple of years: in O’Neill’s 1922 work diary, following the triumphant reception of The Emperor Jones, he’d jotted down, “Play of Johnny T.—negro who married white woman—base play on his experiences as I have seen it intimately—but no reproduction, see it only as man’s.” The only mixed-race marriage O’Neill saw “intimately” was that of his close friend Joe Smith from the Hell Hole and his wife, Miss Viola. The week Smith died at age fifty-six in 1929, the African American New York Amsterdam News ran an obituary headlined, “Village Man Who Helped Famous Playwright Dies.” The death notice’s opening line didn’t identify Smith as the gangster, auctioneer, or Greenwich Village personality that he was but rather as the man “whose knowledge of the relations of Negroes and whites and his vivid imagination enabled Eugene O’Neill, noted white playwright, to write ‘All God’s Chillun Got Wings.’” (Indeed, Smith must have been more engaged in the actual production than formerly known, since his granddaughter, Alice Nelson, was cast as one of the girls for its opening street scene.)95

O’Neill was touring around France in 1929 when he received a despondent letter from his old crony from the Hell Hole. In his plaintive letter, written just before his death, Smith told O’Neill that he’d given up trying to make it in the world. O’Neill responded with a check and words of encouragement that simultaneously look back on O’Neill’s anguished protagonist in All God’s Chillun and forward to Smith’s later appearance as the black gambler Joe Mott in The Iceman Cometh: “You know you’ve always got my best wishes and that I am your friend and will always do anything I can to help you. I haven’t forgotten the old days and your loyal friendship for me. … Buck up, Joe! You’re not going to confess the game has licked you, are you? That isn’t like you! Get a new grip on yourself and you can knock it dead!”⁹⁶

Along with Smith, the story of Etta Johnson, the boxing sensation Jack Johnson’s white wife, was another likely source for the play. News of her suicide, a highly publicized consequence of antimiscegenation feelings on both sides of the racial line, appeared in the pages of the New London Day on September 12, 1912, while O’Neill was in town working for the Telegraph, with the headline, “Mrs. Jack Johnson Could Not Endure Ostracism: Champion Pugilist’s Wife Killed Herself with Bullet After Saying Everyone Shunned Her Because She Had Married a Negro.” Etta Johnson’s suicide note read, “I am a white woman and am tired of being a social outcast. I deserve all of my misery for marrying a black man. Even the negroes don’t respect me; they hate me. I intend to end it all.”97 If members of the public hadn’t made this connection with O’Neill’s play on their own, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American drama critic made it for them: “It seems that negroes would be the first to resent this thing. When the negro pugilist, Jack Johnson, was parading his ownership of white womanhood, no one showered him with ‘bravos.’ That was in real life, too, but hardly a thing to form the basis of a play.”⁹⁸

O’Neill conspicuously co-opted his protagonists’ first names, Jim and Ella, from his recently departed parents. And the parallels between the actual couple and the fictional couple don’t end there. Jim’s desire to “pass” the bar exam is analogous in the play to “passing,” if only psychologically, as white, a dual goal that he ultimately fails to achieve as a result of his racist wife’s mental sabotage. (In a noteworthy coincidence, Paul Robeson was forced to put off his own bar exam in order to devote himself to the rehearsals of the play.)⁹⁹ Jim fails to achieve his dream of success, just as James O’Neill had failed to attain real stature as a Shakespearean actor. Both Jim and James are also thwarted by the needs of their troubled wives—in the final scenes, Ella Harris is driven back to angelic childhood by her own racism and Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night to her Catholic schoolgirl days through the power of morphine. Still, along with his parents’ names, the characters also share the two best-known slave names in all of American fiction: the slave Jim from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Eliza Harris from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

O’Neill completed All God’s Chillun in October of 1923, and the play appeared in George Jean Nathan’s American Mercury that February 1924, at which time the Provincetown Playhouse announced they would put it on that spring.¹⁰⁰ To print such a tale in a literary journal read by a handful of downtown literati was one thing; but to show a white actress kissing the hand of a black man live on a public stage was quite another. Simply put, O’Neill was accused of promoting miscegenation. It was then reported that Helen MacKellar, who’d starred as Ruth Atkins in Beyond the Horizon, turned down the role with “outraged hauteur” after hearing that the leading man wasn’t to be played by a white man in blackface. O’Neill denied this and made a public statement that he’d meant the part for Mary Blair from the beginning. The press then circulated a follow-up story with a picture of Blair captioned, “The play requires that the white girl kiss the negro’s hand on stage,”101 which circulated in papers across the country.

At the end of a day-long interview at Brook Farm with the New York Times, O’Neill admitted to the incendiary nature of the material while at the same time maintaining his rejection of open propagandizing: “Of course, the struggle between [Jim and Ella] is primarily the result of the difference in their racial heritage, but it is their characters, the gap between them and their struggle to bridge it which interests me as a dramatist, nothing else. I didn’t create the gap, this cleavage—it exists. And members of both races do struggle to bridge it with love. Whether they should or not isn’t in my play.” Thematically, he said, the plot would still hold true if Jim had been Japanese and Ella white, “or if Harris had been a German, and the play produced in France. Or an Armenian in Turkey. Or a Jew and a Gentile.”¹⁰² But they weren’t. He was black and she was white, in America, and that seemed to matter a great deal to a lot of people.

If O’Neill’s hoped-for effect was for race relations to come across as “incidental” in All God’s Chillun, he couldn’t have failed more disastrously. But he remained obstinate. “I know I am right,” he said. “I know that all the irresponsible gabble of the sensation-mongers and notoriety hounds is wrong. They are the ones who are trying to rouse ill feeling [between the races] and they should be held responsible. … All we ask is a square deal.”¹⁰³ “Prejudice born of an entire ignorance of the subject,” he said in a follow-up press release, “is the last word in injustice and absurdity. The Provincetown Playhouse has ignored all criticism not founded on a knowledge of the play and will continue to ignore it.”104 In the weeks leading up to the production, however, some criticism would prove impossible to ignore.

“Gentlemen!” roared Professor George Odell of Columbia University, thumping his fist on a table, “Eugene O’Neill is responsible for the profanity and insanity on the American stage today!”¹⁰⁵ Countless voices rose up to join Odell’s cry: the Society for the Prevention of Vice and Crime, Hearst’s New York American newspaper, the Ku Klux Klan, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Authors’ League of America, the Salvation Army, the New York Board of Education, and New York City Hall all united against the production on Macdougal Street.

When asked in the spirit of compromise to take out the hand-kissing scene, O’Neill flatly refused: “The play will stand as it is. That would weaken the entire last scene. It is the climax on which the entire play is built.”¹⁰⁶ This only exacerbated matters, of course. The Provincetown Playhouse was next harassed with poison-pen letters, bomb threats, and warnings of race riots. The Long Island chapter of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to blow up the theater on opening night. “If you open this play,” it warned, “the theater will be bombed, and you will be responsible for all the people killed.” In retrospect, Paul Robeson considered the whole affair pretty laughable, but the situation was worse than he ever knew. O’Neill and Jimmy Light purposefully hid the vilest letters from their actors. “A great many,” Light recalled later, “were obscene or threatening or both, but Mary and Paul didn’t see the largest part because we began holding them back. I remember one in particular to Mary, really filthy, pathological.”¹⁰⁷

The worst was addressed to O’Neill from the Georgia Klan’s Grand Kleagle. The letter began reasonably, more of a form letter than a threat, but then got to the point: “You have a son [Shane]. If your play goes on, don’t expect to see him again.” Without hesitation, Light said, O’Neill scrawled across it in bold letters, “Go fuck yourself!” signed it “Gene Tyrone O’Neill,” and fired it back to the Klansman by return mail.¹⁰⁸ (O’Neill’s actual middle name was Gladstone, named for the nineteenth-century British prime minister who favored home rule for Ireland. Tyrone is the county from which the O’Neill tribe originated and the name O’Neill would give the family in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s probable that by signing his letter this way, he was defiantly identifying himself as Irish Catholic, another group hated by the Klan.)

George Jean Nathan noted in American Mercury that Colonel Billy Mayfield “of the Protective Order of the Ku Klux Klan, Texas Lodge” wrote an editorial in the Klan’s newsletter The Fiery Cross demanding “the immediate dispatch of [O’Neill] on the ground that he is a Catholic and hence doubtless trying to stir up the Negroes to arm, march on Washington, and burn down the Nordic White House.” The Fiery Cross responded with an equally sarcastic item of its own: “Art is fast approaching its highest pinnacle in America. We are to be congratulated. … It will be interesting to watch the success of the production. … Its uplift will be tremendous and do much toward bringing about ‘universal brotherhood,’ of which we now hear so much.”109

This wasn’t the criminalized white supremacist outfit of later years. The Klan by the mid-1920s had a national membership of around 5 million. Thus O’Neill wasn’t facing just the condemnation of racists and the press but a reigning moral stance of the times. Miscegenation, after all, was illegal in thirty of the forty-eight United States. (This number would remain steady until 1948 and wouldn’t arrive at zero until 1967.) Augustus Thomas, one of the most highly respected American playwrights of the time, publicly stated that he thought O’Neill was treading on thin societal ice. “In the first place,” Thomas wrote, “I should never have written the play, and in the second place, if I had I should be willing to do what is usually done in such cases, to permit a white man to play the part of the negro. The present arrangement, I think, has a tendency to break down social barriers which are better left untouched.” The choice to cast Robeson instead of a white actor, Thomas said, appealing to the literary angle, was an “unnecessary concession to realism.” (When Thomas was a guest lecturer at Baker’s English 47 seminar during O’Neill’s time there, he’d encouraged the students to write their plays as vehicles for actors; O’Neill refused to attend.)¹¹⁰

Several prominent literary figures, on the other hand, black and white, rallied to support O’Neill. On the latter side, these included two rising men of letters, Edmund Wilson and the poet T. S. Eliot. Eliot wrote that in his estimation, the dramatist “not only understands one aspect of the ‘negro problem,’ but he succeeds in giving this problem universality, in implying wider application.” Wilson, in his New Republic review, hailed the play as “one of the best things yet written about the race problem and among the best of O’Neill’s plays.”111

New York’s black audiences were just as divided over the play as whites. Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, two of the era’s most respected black intellectuals, defended it. Locke dubbed it, along with The Emperor Jones, a work of “fine craftsmanship” by a “clairvoyant genius,” while Du Bois wrote an impassioned program note for the Experimental Theatre’s playbill: “Any mention of Negro blood or Negro life in America for a century has been occasion for an ugly picture, a dirty allusion, a nasty comment or a pessimistic forecast. The result is that the Negro today fears any attempt of the artist to paint Negroes. He is not satisfied unless everything is perfect and proper and beautiful and joyful and hopeful. He is afraid to be painted as he is, lest his human foibles and shortcomings be seized by his enemies for the purposes of the ancient and hateful propaganda. … Eugene O’Neill is bursting through. He has my sympathy, for his soul must be lame with the blows rained upon him. But it is work that must be done.”¹¹²

Others responded with open hostility. O’Neill had made one of the country’s most feared taboos, mixed-race marriage, even more inflammatory by choosing to unite an upright African American man with an ignorant Irish American woman. It was demeaning, they contended, that Ella was intellectually and morally beneath Jim. In the Nation review, proving their point, a white critic wrote, “Why mate a first-rate Negro with a third-rate white woman? Because those are the facts. … Only this woman would have married a Negro in America today.”¹¹³

William H. Lewis, the son of Virginia slaves and the first African American to hold many essential government posts, including U.S. attorney general, had become a political leader in Boston and declared that O’Neill’s play would be banned not only in Boston but across New England—and justifiably so: “Every negro in New England,” he said, “will engage in this battle against this insidious effort at propaganda that insults the intelligence and self-respect of every negro in this country.” Religious leaders from the black community also joined in the protest. Macgowan related in a satiric New York Times article that the controversy had “stirred up the racial feelings of the Rev. Dr. Squiddlebottom”—that is, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and father of the future political leader of the same name. Powell asserted that All God’s Chillun would place racial equality in jeopardy because the play “intimates that we [black men] are desirous of marrying white women. … The kissing of a white woman by a big, strapping negro is bound to cause bad feelings. … For myself and my congregation, the largest colored Baptist Church in the city, I want to go on record as being opposed to Mr. O’Neill’s play.” Rev. J. W. Brown, pastor of Mother Africa Methodist Episcopal Zion Church agreed: “This play is most unfortunate as it portrays the negro in the wrong light. No thinking colored man desired to marry outside of his own race.”114

Paul Robeson, soon one of the most revered African American performers in history, was twenty-six when he published his essay on the matter entitled “Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays.” This moving reminiscence of his experience working with O’Neill and Jimmy Light was published, six months after the run, in the Urban League’s journal Opportunity—one of the most influential organs of the Harlem Renaissance. “The reactions to [Jones and All God’s Chillun] among Negroes,” he wrote, “but point out one of the most serious drawbacks to the development of a true Negro dramatic literature. We are too self-conscious, too afraid of showing all phases of our life—especially those phases which are of greatest dramatic value. The great mass of our group discourage any member who has the courage to fight these petty prejudices.” “If there ever was a broad, liberal-minded man,” Robeson said of O’Neill, “he is one. He has had Negro friends and appreciated them for their true worth. He would be the last to cast any slur on the colored people.” He admits to having been a neophyte to the stage less than a year earlier but states that his opportunity to act in “two of the finest plays of America’s most distinguished playwright” had transformed him permanently into a dedicated man of the theater.115

Nearly a decade later, in 1933, when Robeson’s film version of The Emperor Jones was released, the reaction in Harlem was divided once again: “I can’t see how a man in Mr. Robeson’s standing would be a parrot just to make a few bucks,” an audience member wrote to Harlem’s Amsterdam News. “I am a man that loves my race and am willing to stand up and fight to the end any day for it.” The article goes on to describe a standing-room-only screening at Harlem’s Roosevelt Theatre: in spite of protests over the word “nigger,” “which aroused more heated discussion, and in some quarters more indignation, than any other incident in the last decade … the audience—or the major part of it—fairly worshipped [Jones].”¹¹⁶ Still, as the audience gathered on the street out front, a man was overheard remarking, “I got my opinion of a nigger who would stoop that low and use that word on the screen for the white folks.”¹¹⁷

Jimmy Light directed All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and he’d initially hoped to get out in front of the escalating hullabaloo and release the production as early as possible; but then he delayed it for the season’s final bill. In part, this was because when the American Mercury first commissioned the play, O’Neill’s contract stipulated that it not go on until at least three weeks after publication. On top of this, when rehearsals began, Mary Blair came down with pleurisy and was hospitalized for nearly a month. Macgowan conceded that to blame a leading lady’s illness for a delay, given the theater world’s unbending “the show must go on” tradition, was the “lamest excuse in the world.” Buoyed by an approval rate of about 85 percent from their subscribers, the Provincetown Playhouse moved ahead with rehearsals.¹¹⁸

Given these setbacks, Light and the Triumvirate concocted a shrewd tactical move that would draw the press away from the All God’s Chillun scandal, which they saw only exacerbated with time: they would revive The Emperor Jones, with Robeson playing that role as well, ten days before the scheduled opening of All God’s Chillun on May 15, 1924. This decision had the favorable effect of taking the spotlight off the escalating scandal and onto the comparative talents of the Provincetown’s newest African American star against Gilpin’s by then legendary performance.119 Although Robeson had at first rejected the role of Brutus Jones as at best unseemly and at worst racist, he then he heard about Gilpin. “I remember vividly picking up the paper one morning at breakfast, and reading the printed eulogies,” Robeson said. “I could not help wondering if I too should have been so acclaimed if, when my chance came, I had accepted it.”¹²⁰

The Emperor Jones’s revival allowed cast and crew to blow off steam beforehand as well, in the calm eye of this unrelenting storm of public hysteria. One night after a performance, Jimmy Light discovered O’Neill pounding the tom-tom drum onstage. He never stopped drumming, even as he and Light climbed the stairs to attend the party in Cleon Throckmorton’s apartment. At one point, Light, Robeson, and Throckmorton removed their shirts to compare physiques. Boulton, with connubial pride, induced O’Neill to show off his. He did so, revealing his own well-muscled torso, then continued on with his drumming. Boom—boom—boom—the noise reverberated up and down Macdougal Street, attracting the attention of a cop on the beat. The officer also happened to be one of their bootleggers, and he agreed to let the party relocate to O’Neill’s old roommate Barney Gallant’s basement-level speakeasy, Club Gallant, at 40 Washington Square South. There O’Neill continued his shirtless communion with the tom-tom late into the night.¹²¹

Heywood Broun arrived at the theater on All God’s Chillun’s opening with a holstered Colt .45. Hart Crane stepped into the building armed, in his words, with a “cane for cudgeling the unruly.”¹²² James “Slim” Martin, a steelworker associated with Terry Carlin, had rounded up a gang of roughnecks to protect the actors and the theater. Two of these were assigned to Robeson as bodyguards—staring six inches upward at the former football all-star, they snorted at the ludicrous prospect that he needed protecting and strode off to look after weaker targets. (O’Neill was, naturally, back at Brook Farm on opening night, pleading an unspecified illness.)¹²³

Manhattan district attorney Joab H. Banton, a Texan, had sworn he’d “get” O’Neill, and he had one last possibility do so: he would refuse to allow children to perform in the play. Black and white children are featured in the opening scene, before they lose their angels’ wings and age into racist adults. The theater knew the law requiring a permit to employ child actors; but that was largely a formality of the Gerry Society, which had already granted them permission. Then, late in the night before the opening, the playhouse received a call from Mayor John F. Hylan’s “Chief Magistrate,” reported the Herald Tribune, that “revoked the Gerry Society’s permission for children to appear in the performance. … It is evidently believed by the officials that the small actors of both races would be hurt by contact with one another in the theater, though not in the public schools and elsewhere.” (One white father did send a telegram from Georgia refusing to allow his preteen son to perform onstage with black children.)124

Hylan submitted his legal grounds a few days later, when the damage had already been done: the children were too young to act on a professional stage. This didn’t hold up, since the eight child actors were aged eleven to seventeen, within acceptable bounds; in addition, a Broadway show was granted a permit to hire an eight-year-old the following week, a clear indication that the city simply wished to put an end to the O’Neill production. Harry Weinberger, the Experimental Theatre’s attorney, hiked down to city hall the day after the premiere. Hylan refused him an audience, but his executive secretary listened to the arguments in silence. When Weinberger had finished his case, the secretary responded by asking if he’d ever seen such a long spring. Weinberger then invited the mayor or his secretary to attend the play gratis and see it for themselves but was declined.¹²⁵

When Jimmy Light stepped out from a proscenium entrance on opening night to explain the mandate from city hall, he was welcomed with cheers and whistles. Light asked if he should read the children’s dialogue out loud, to which the audience chanted, “Read! Read!”¹²⁶

Paul Robeson and Mary Blair in the Provincetown Playhouse production of All God’s Chillun Got Wings, spring 1924.

(COURTESY OF JEFF KENNEDY)

The audience that evening was racially mixed, and to ward off a riot, or even an isolated scuffle, no one was permitted to watch the play standing. Seated to the left of Kelcey Allen, the drama critic for Women’s Wear Daily, Allen reported, was “one of the best poets of the negro race in America, a man who probably understands the strivings of his people as few others do.” (Allen kept him anonymous, though in all likelihood this was Claude McKay, a vanguard poet of the Harlem Renaissance who’d just arrived back from Paris that January. As a former editor of Max Eastman’s radical magazine the Liberator, he often appeared at Village happenings like this one.) “Such a man,” Allen wrote, “possessing the delicate emotional sensitiveness of a poet, would be likely to sense the most intangible slight or slur against his race. But it was evident that he found nothing in the play that is degrading and everything that is ennobling.”127

Another reviewer, hostile to “the little reds, pinks, radicals and general nuts of Greenwich Village nutdom,” thought the play “miscegenation propaganda” and wrote that “an agitated patroness, who sat next to me did not keep her thoughts secret by any means. She confided to me that she was from the South and regarded the whole affair as worthy of the attention of the Ku Klux Klan. She was heartily seconded by half a dozen who sat around us.”¹²⁸ The only interruption of the night was a drunk who stumbled into the theater in mid-performance and took a seat; he muttered that he didn’t understand the play, then said, “Where the hell am I?” and stumbled out. Aside from this unrehearsed bit of comedy, O’Neill said later, “nothing at all happened, not even a single senile egg.” The only evidence of potential foul play was a yellow pamphlet left behind on a seat entitled “The Ku Klux Klan.”¹²⁹ By the end of the performance most critics had felt “cheated,” O’Neill said, “that there hadn’t been at least one murder that first night.” Even the scene when Blair kissed Robeson’s hand, noted one disappointed critic, “caused no more than a tremor of resentment and was, so far as any demonstration is concerned, completely unnoticed by the audience.” Robert Benchley of Life pronounced drily that the production, “long dreaded by the champions of Nordic supremacy and the guardians of the honor of white womanhood, has taken place, and, at a late hour last night, white women were still as safe on the streets of New York as they ever were and the banner of purity still floated from the ramparts of our own Caucasian stronghold.”130

Paul Robeson played the roles of Brutus Jones and Jim Harris back-to-back from May 5 to October 10, then played Jones again that December.¹³¹ The racial attacks persisted on all sides over the role of Jim Harris, Robeson wrote in his Opportunity piece, but never from people who had either read or attended the play. “Audiences that came to scoff,” he said, “went away in tears.”¹³² “Robeson adds to his extraordinary physique a shrewd, rich understanding of the role,” the New York Sun raved, “and a voice that is unmatched in the American theater. This dusky giant unleashed in a great play, provides the kind of evening in the theater that you remember all your life.”¹³³

All God’s Chillun lasted one hundred performances, with a break to transfer to the Greenwich Village Theatre in Sheridan Square that August. However, the last-minute solution to the problem of casting children, according to O’Neill, “enraged the police authorities” so badly that it “stirred up trouble” for his next highly contentious play, Desire Under the Elms.

“God’s Hard, Not Easy”

That August 1924, O’Neill, to his irritation, was browbeaten into attending a performance of his S.S. Glencairn plays. It was held at Provincetown’s local Barn Theatre, and he’d been “expecting to be bored stiff,” he told Kenneth Macgowan afterward, but found himself utterly charmed by the production. He was most impressed by the way its director, his Provincetown friend and Greenwich Village bookstore owner Frank Shay, had combined the independent one-acts (minus In the Zone) into a seamless “single-complete play about sailors.” But the old tales of his time with his shipmates at sea also made him “homesick for homelessness and irresponsibility,” he admitted, “and I believe—philosophically, at any rate—that I was a sucker ever to go in for playwrighting, mating and begetting sons, houses and lots, and all the similar snares of the ‘property game’ for securing spots in the sun which become spots on the sun.”¹³⁴

O’Neill’s urge toward possessiveness, a trait he’d always decried in his father, had gotten the better of him, and he was now broke. Welded hadn’t even made enough to pay his income taxes for the year, his family’s estate continued “quiescently in probate,” and the $1,000 to Kathleen Jenkins for Eugene was causing his financial back to “creak under the strain.” He needed a quick infusion of cash, and after seeing the Glencairn plays produced together in Provincetown, he believed that they would make a hit in New York and proposed that the Triumvirate put them on themselves. All God’s Chillun had also reopened at the Greenwich Village Theatre that August, and to boost ticket sales he suggested that Macgowan hire a “foxy press-agent” to stir up ticket sales with controversy by goading Mayor Hylan into attempting to shut the production down again.135

O’Neill had begun a new play, Marco Millions, and was hunting for a new uptown producer. Marco Millions required an enormous cast and complex scenery changes that, he knew, couldn’t be performed adequately downtown. In an attempt to entice the backing of theater giant David Belasco, he explained in a letter to the wary producer that although it takes place in the thirteenth century, the play was in reality a “comedy satire by an American of our life & ideals.” The usually dependable Arthur Hopkins had also left him hanging on his decision regarding The Fountain, which led O’Neill to regard Hopkins as “not the right sort of Santa Claus for me to believe in.”¹³⁶ At the end of the day, his financial hopes rested on his full-length tragedy Desire Under the Elms, which the Triumvirate scheduled to follow S.S. Glencairn.¹³⁷

By the time the S.S. Glencairn plays opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on November 3, 1924, O’Neill’s work could no longer be dismissed as an aberration of the times. His celebrity had grown all out of proportion to what anyone could have expected from an American playwright. His plays were also making headway in Europe, with productions scheduled in Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. Quite a few drama critics attended the Glencairn one-acts when they’d premiered singly on Macdougal Street; but given the Provincetown Players’ hostility to reviewers, only a handful had actually reviewed them (In the Zone, staged by the Washington Square Players, excepted). When the Glencairn plays appeared as one bill that fall, 1924, the notices reflected a wistful nostalgia for O’Neill’s sea plays of the 1910s after the high-pitched clamor of the last four years. Their respite from controversy lasted for about a week.

Desire Under the Elms opened on November 11 at the Greenwich Village Theatre on nearby Sheridan Square. The Experimental Theatre, Inc., had taken over the space for its second season to expand its audience base while still running plays at the Provincetown Playhouse. The critics diverged wildly over O’Neill’s new full-length: the more conservative-minded among them viewed the play as a needlessly sordid and pessimistic tableau; others praised it ardently, while still recognizing its flaws. “I don’t wish to pretend that ‘Desire Under the Elms’ is a good play simply because O’Neill happens to be the author of it,” wrote George Jean Nathan. “But it is far and away so much better than most of the plays being written by anyone else who hangs around here that one gratefully passes over even its obvious deficiencies. It doesn’t matter much if a beautiful and amiable and engaging woman tucks in her napkin at her chin or not.”138

O’Neill acknowledged the clear “line of development” from The Emperor Jones to The Hairy Ape to All God’s Chillun to this latest creation.¹³⁹ But his expressionistic-naturalistic portrayal of New England culture, which takes place in 1850 at a Connecticut farmhouse, was also a by-product of nineteenth-century realism’s local-color tradition. Before the action of the play, Ephraim Cabot, a farmer in his seventies, believes that God ordered him to find a new wife, and he does—a much younger woman named Abbie Putnam. (As an inside joke to his Provincetown friends, O’Neill named Abbie after a librarian there who’d once refused O’Neill a library card and thrown him out for drunkenness.) Ephraim’s son Eben believes that their farm is rightfully his, as his deceased mother had a claim on its ownership. At first Eben hates Abbie for presuming the farm is now hers; but in spite of her greed, Abbie and Eben fall in love, and she gives birth to a son. Ephraim believes the new heir is his own and convinces Eben that Abbie’s been playing him for a fool. After Eben confronts her, she murders their infant in his crib as proof to Eben (and to a large extent the audience, given her earlier manipulations) that she loves him alone. At first, Eben is horrified by the news and notifies the authorities. But he returns crestfallen over his betrayal and, throwing off his previous possessiveness over the farm as she’d thrown off her own, takes shared responsibility for the crime. In the final scene, the lovers pledge their love to one another and admire the sunrise as the sheriff’s men lead them to their punishment—most likely the gallows. Ephraim resigns himself to living out his final years alone on the farm.

By this time, Robert Edmond Jones, who directed and designed the play’s sets, was the recognized “father” of American scenic design. After a decade of perfecting his methods with, among others, Arthur Hopkins, the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, and now the Experimental Theatre, Inc., Jones had effectively imported from Europe what became known as the “new stagecraft”—the use of colorful backdrops and lighting to complement each play’s plot and characters rather than the traditional scenery that was merely functional or ornamental. For Desire Under the Elms, only the rooms of the Cabot house in which action is taking place were meant to be visible at any given time, making the four chambers of the two-story structure intimate the systole and diastole of the human heart. Two massive elms loom over each side, their branches hanging down over a battered roof and emitting a green glow in contrast to the house’s gray exterior. O’Neill describes these elms in gendered terms: “There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption. They have developed from their intimate contact with the life of man in the house an appalling humaneness. … They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles” (CP2, 318).140

At an early rehearsal in that fall of 1924, the three members of the Triumvirate convened the entire cast and crew of the Experimental Theatre, Inc., at the Greenwich Village Theatre. They were preparing to open the season with Stark Young’s The Saint, and Bobby Jones, who was directing that too, solemnly addressed the troupe: “Recently I heard the story of a blind child on whom a successful operation had been performed. When the bandages were finally removed from its eyes, the child looked around in ecstasy and murmured, ‘What is this thing called light?’ To me, the theatre is like a light that blind people are made to see for the first time. The theatre is a dream that the audience comes to behold. The theatre is revelation. That is what I want to tell you.”141 Jones then silently walked up the aisle and out of the theater. Macgowan turned to O’Neill and asked if he had anything to add. He said no, and the performers were dismissed.

Jones had been raised in New Hampshire, and he understood that O’Neill wanted the New England setting and Puritan attributes to equal in importance O’Neill’s plot and characterization. Tough-minded “New England granite” culture was to be symbolized by a permanent fieldstone wall in front of a shabby gray farmhouse. New England Puritans believed that God was a jealous, pitiless, and wrathful being, a vision Jonathan Edwards immortalized in his blood-and-thunder sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards’s theology guides the play’s devout protagonist Ephraim Cabot’s worldview: “God’s hard, not easy! … I kin feel I be in the palm o’ His hand, His fingers guidin’ me. … God’s hard an’ lonesome!” (CP2, 377). Outside of intellectual circles in the 1920s, Puritans were widely admired in the United States, as one reviewer wrote, “for their courage, their rugged persistency, their industry, their narrow adherence to narrow standards. … [But] we have begun to wonder,” she said after attending the play, “if England had not something on her side when she ejected the Puritans.”¹⁴²

For all of O’Neill’s own atheism and bohemian living, he still regarded the hellfire-and-brimstone Puritan farmer Ephraim as “so autobiographical.” When O’Neill hired a man to type up the script, he invited him on a series of three-mile walks through the woods, always pointing out crumbling fieldstone walls, quoting from his play, “Stones atop o’ stones—year atop o’ year.” “What I think everyone missed in Desire,” he said that March, “is the quality in it I set most store by—the attempt to give an epic tinge to New England’s inhibited life-lust, to make its inexpressiveness poetically expressive, to release it.”¹⁴³ Such a release, of course, sends his characters to their doom. But he deplored the “sneering contentment” of soft thinking, if not always in practice, and he thus equated a “happy ending” for the audience with unearned success. Tragedy was hard and therefore earned. For O’Neill, the notion of a tragic ending as “unhappy” was a “mere present-day judgment,” and he pointed out that the Greeks and Elizabethans had recognized the elevating attributes of tragedies like Desire Under the Elms. “Truth,” he said, “in the theatre as in life, is eternally difficult just as the easy is the everlasting lie.”144

The shadow of Sigmund Freud once again descended upon the talk over O’Neill’s dramatic vision. Ephraim’s son Eben fixates on his mother’s memory, hates his father, and conducts a heated sexual affair with his stepmother, which is technically incest though they are not blood related. Most critics were thus aroused to single out Freud’s influence, especially the “Oedipal complex,” or the subconscious desire among men to kill their father in order to marry their mother, rather than Greek mythology itself, as the guiding source for Desire Under the Elms. (Since Eben adores both his mother and stepmother, critic Gilbert W. Gabriel wryly asked a doctor in the lobby whether this might be diagnosed as an “Oedipus duplex.”) O’Neill was yet again moved to write a public denial: “To me, Freud only means uncertain conjectures and explanations about the truths of the emotional past of mankind that every dramatist has clearly sensed since real drama began. … I respect Freud’s work tremendously—but I’m not an addict! Whatever Freudianism is in Desire must have walked right in ‘through my unconscious.’”¹⁴⁵

After two successful months in Greenwich Village, Desire Under the Elms transferred to the Earl Carroll Theater for its Broadway run. Prior to this, producers assumed that no tragedy, that is, a play without a happy ending, no matter how tantalizing, could last more than twenty weeks uptown. It ran for nine months, 420 performances total, making it the longest-running tragedy yet in American theater history. And once it had moved uptown, the Triumvirate required no “foxy press-agent” to manufacture controversy. That would come free of charge.

Over the summer of 1924, O’Neill had resolutely steered clear of alcohol, with but one exception—a cruel trick orchestrated by “dat ole davil, sea.” One morning at Peaked Hill Bar, Boulton notified Harold de Polo that a ten-gallon drum of “200 % pure alcohol” had been “left up on our doorstep by the sea!” O’Neill’s bender lasted only a couple of days, she said. (This was reassuring but false: She later told a doctor he was off the wagon for nearly two weeks.)146 On November 12, the day after Desire Under the Elms opened, O’Neill returned to the bottle and continued drinking, around the clock, through December.¹⁴⁷ Quitting in Ridgefield proved impossible. Not only was it close to New York, a city he could now tolerate only when drunk, but Brook Farm itself, he wrote Theatre Guild producer Lawrence Langner in hindsight, “always drove me to hard cider, acidosis, and the Old Testament in the weepy, muddy, slush-and-snow days.”¹⁴⁸ O’Neill desperately wanted out of New England, preferably to a warmer climate.

At Peaked Hill Bar that previous summer, O’Neill and Boulton hosted Mary Blair, following her ordeal with All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Juliet Brenon, Cleon Throckmorton’s fiancée. Brenon had just returned from Bermuda and gushed over the island’s tropical climate. O’Neill remembered when Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook mentioned back in 1920 how, after he’d finished with Beyond the Horizon and Chris, they should go down to visit the writer Wilbur Daniel Steele, who’d sent them “entrancing letters” from Bermuda.¹⁴⁹ They hadn’t, but now he needed no further persuasion—that’s where they would escape the punishing New England winter.¹⁵⁰ Desire Under the Elms, along with the two-volume The Complete Works of Eugene O’Neill, forthcoming that December through his publishers Boni and Liveright, promised enough in royalties for them to sail to Bermuda in late November for an indefinite stay.¹⁵¹

The voyage from New York to Bermuda took two days on the S.S. Fort St. George, a steamer that weekly ferried passengers the seven hundred miles out to the British island. O’Neill and Boulton disembarked in Hamilton, the capital, on December 1, with Shane, Gaga, Cookie Burton, Finn Mac Cool, and a new bull terrier named Bowser after his brother’s story. The famed couple made a spectacle as they extracted themselves, their entourage, and their dogs from customs to the New Windsor Hotel. Oleander and hibiscus were in bloom, dappling the colonial town in pink and scarlet. In 1925, Bermuda’s population was twenty-four thousand, about the same as New London’s, and no automobiles were allowed on the island. Bermudians traveled exclusively about the countryside in surreys with a fringe on top, traps, and other horse-drawn vehicles.152

The O’Neills rented two bungalows, Campsea and Crow’s Nest, perched high upon the cliffs overlooking the pink-hued beach and south shore of Paget parish (a site since occupied by the Coral Beach Club). The flowers and sultry air notwithstanding, the first weeks did not go well. Boulton had announced that she was pregnant, and the idea of a third “heir” exacerbated O’Neill’s drinking. Mentally, he felt “depressed and slushy … miserably disorganized” from booze, and he suffered from insomnia.¹⁵³ Devoid of inspiration, not even for a swim in the azure sea, he was capable only of sifting through a pile of Saturday Evening Posts. For him, the weekly offered an intellectual vacation. “Talk about narcotics!” he wrote in his diary. “My favorite!”¹⁵⁴

By January 4, O’Neill had begun to taper off drinking and recorded in his diary how many drinks he consumed each day—one before lunch, three before dinner, and so on.¹⁵⁵ After a week, he was back on the wagon, with only the occasional ale with lunch, and he even quit smoking. (Aside from such intermittent pulmonary holidays, O’Neill was at least a pack-a-day smoker for life.) He was finally able to settle down and cut Marco Millions down to a performable size. Within a few weeks he sent it off to Dario Belasco, who’d expressed interest in producing it. He also read Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (“interesting stuff but damn dryly written”) and a book-length issue of the medical journal Practitioner on alcoholism (“very interesting + applicable to me”). On January 31, while reading David Seabury’s Unmasking Our Minds (“too primary school”), he’d begun his latest and most ambitious work yet, a mask play entitled The Great God Brown.¹⁵⁶

O’Neill’s abstinence might well have eased marital tensions had whiskey not been promptly replaced by another source of conflict by the name of Alice Cuthbert. Cuthbert was vacationing at the nearby Elbow Beach Club with her sister Charlotte “Tottie” Barbour, who worked in publishing and was acquainted with a few of the Provincetown Players.157 Upon their first meeting on the beach, O’Neill thought Cuthbert “a peach! Athletic swimmer’s figure—out-of-door girl—simple (perhaps too) + unspoiled.”¹⁵⁸ He told an increasingly jealous Boulton that the young woman exuded “a rare & beautiful quality,” and she soon heard a rumor of their holding hands while swimming together. O’Neill denied this and swore they were merely “swimming in tandem.”¹⁵⁹ Growing more and more enraged by the number of trysts between her husband and Cuthbert, Boulton reached a breaking point in early February, and O’Neill ruefully noted in his diary, “fight over Alice.” This time, if perhaps she had in the past, Boulton wasn’t overreacting; a love poem O’Neill wrote that winter titled “To Alice” longingly begins and ends,

The sun

And you

Two things in life

Are true. …

You, the sun, & sea,

Trinity!

Sweet spirit, pass on

Keep the dream

Beauty

Into infinity.

Still, Boulton recognized that her compulsive husband had neither the time nor the emotional wherewithal for extramarital affairs—not of a sexual nature, she felt certain, at least not yet.¹⁶⁰

“Dirty day!” O’Neill groaned on February 21, 1925. “Wild cable from Madden.” Their production of Desire Under the Elms was about “to be indicted. Can’t believe.” “‘D’ played to 13,500 last week, fancy that! Helped by scandal, damn it! M. [Richard Madden, his agent] says ‘situation favorable’—jury trial Wednesday likely. Damned nonsense! … Wire from Kenneth saying no indictment, that ‘D’ has been referred to play jury. This is good news. Old [District Attorney Joab] Banton seems to be beaten again, the bloody ass! … Much talk of Banton’s calling me ‘damned fool.’ Ha-ha! Business booming. It’s an ill wind! But it attracts wrong audience, damn it!”161

The play’s moral “distresses,” reported the Herald Tribune, “range from unholy lust to infanticide, and they include drinking, cursing, vengeance, and something approaching incest.” Once it moved uptown, District Attorney Banton again played right into the Triumvirate’s hands. The play was “too thoroughly bad,” said Banton, who charged the theater group with promoting “salacity and indecency.”¹⁶² As a public relations ploy, Macgowan was the one who suggested they invite a “citizens’ play-jury” to sit in on a performance, which they did on March 13. The play was duly exonerated, but the word was already out among New York’s theatergoing public. The Triumvirate looked on in delight as thousands ignored the scathing reviews, of which there were quite a few, and stampeded the box office. Gross ticket sales shot up from $10,000 or $12,000, which O’Neill already considered a “miracle,” to an astonishing $16,000 a week.¹⁶³

“The Desire censorship mess has been amusing, what?” he wrote George Jean Nathan after Banton’s rancorous attacks. “It has a background of real melodramatic plot—the revenge of Banton’s enraged Southern Nordic sensibilities on the author of All God’s Chillun.” Similarly, while paying off his dentist in New York, Dr. J. O. Lief, O’Neill noted the same delicious irony: “But don’t thank me, thank that so-amiable District Attorney!” “Seriously though,” he went on to Lief, “his press-agent work is bad in the long run. It attracts the low-minded, looking for smut, and they are highly disappointed or else laugh wherever they imagine double-meanings. Banton is a vindictive Southern jackass. This was all an attempted revenge on me for ‘All God’s Chillun’ which he tried so hard—and unsuccessfully!—to stop last season.”¹⁶⁴

Law enforcement officials fought the production in cities across the United States, and the furor spread across the Atlantic to Great Britain. (The Lord Chamberlain succeeded in delaying the play’s London premiere until 1940). Upon hearing that the entire cast of the touring company had been arrested in Los Angeles, O’Neill wrote the novelist Upton Sinclair, “I hear they have ‘pinched’ my play ‘Desire Under the Elms’ in your Holy City, Los Angeles. Well, well, and so many of the pioneers are said to have come from New England! Boston has also barred it.”165 A Los Angeles police sergeant, Officer Taylor, arrested the entire cast after attending a performance on behalf of L.A.’s wary Board of Education; he then testified in court, “I was painfully shocked, I blushed” during the scene in which Abbie Putnam is wearing a full-length flannel nightgown. “I sat there so embarrassed that I feared for the time when the act would end and the lights would again be turned on. After I left that place I couldn’t look the world in the face for hours.” Pressed by the judge, Taylor added that his “feelings were hurt, terribly hurt.” The New York Times reported that “snickers and giggles” could be heard from the gallery of the courtroom, “punctuated by the sharp crack of the bailiff’s gavel swung vigorously in a futile effort to preserve decorum.”¹⁶⁶ “And so you object to flannel nightgowns, do you?” the defense attorney queried. “Yes, sir,” he replied, and the gallery burst out laughing.¹⁶⁷

After the judge ordered the cast to perform scenes in the courtroom, the actors were released from custody.¹⁶⁸ Such an absurd courtroom drama might have come straight from O’Neill’s hand. Nearly all of O’Neill’s law enforcement officials are satirically drawn, and many plays—The Web, The Dreamy Kid, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, A Touch of the Poet, and The Iceman Cometh—conclude with policemen ineptly confronting his tragic heroes and heroines. These scenes depict the legal system as hopelessly petty when compared to the laws of nature and desire. “The injustice of Justice,” O’Neill said, “it’s big. It’s fundamental. Too much can’t be said about the farcicality of man-made laws.”¹⁶⁹ The last line of Desire Under the Elms is spoken by the arresting officer, providing an absurd blindness to the tragic heights reached before his arrival: Abbie and Eben kiss and then are led off to face their punishment, while the sheriff gazes about Ephraim’s farm and mutters enviously, “It’s a jim-dandy farm, no denyin’. Wished I owned it!” (CP2, 378).

O’Neill was soon confronted with a less amusing legal issue, however: rather too obvious similarities were inferred between Desire Under the Elms and Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, which the Theatre Guild produced and which beat out Desire for the 1924 Pulitzer Prize. Howard’s play, though a comedy, resembles O’Neill’s triangular romance to such an extent that he was accused of plagiarism. Howard had, in fact, sent his script to the Triumvirate before O’Neill began working on his own play, which he completed in June, so the possibility was real. Malcolm Cowley noted of his visit to Brook Farm in November 1923 that when O’Neill informed him about his New England play, he repeatedly used the word “easy” as his “strongest expression of disapproval,” as Ephraim does; but O’Neill informed Walter Huston, who played the lead as Ephraim Cabot in the premiere, that he dreamed the entire plot one night between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 1923. Kenneth Macgowan admitted later that he’d lent the Howard script to O’Neill, who then came to him in early 1924 with the astonishing news that the play had come to him in his sleep. At the time, Macgowan secretly believed that O’Neill’s borrowing was probably a case of cryptomnesia, what he called “unconscious plagiarism.” Howard, in the end, brought the matter graciously to a close by writing in his preface to the book version of his work that “no two plays could possibly bear less resemblance to each other than this simple comedy of mine and [O’Neill’s] glorious tragedy.”170

The Novelist behind the Mask

After his legal battles had been resolved, O’Neill exulted in the quietude of life in Bermuda: “There’s absolutely nothing interesting to do, and the German bottled beer and English bottled ale are both excellent,” he wrote George Jean Nathan, hoping to get him out for a visit. “The frost and hard cider of too many successive New England winters are slowly being rendered out of my system.” Along with the year-round swimming, “which I do above everything,” the lifestyle permitted him, by March 22, 1925, to complete his four-act mask play The Great God Brown. “Finish ‘B’ in tears!” his diary entry reads for that day. “Couldn’t help myself! … I think it really marks my ‘ceiling’ so far.” A few days later, he’d finished reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which left him in awe: “Most stimulating book on drama ever written!”171

On March 30, Eugene Jr. arrived for a weeklong visit, and he and his father enjoyed another grand reunion, clothes shopping in Hamilton, taking long swims, and lounging on the beach. On April 10, after seeing Eugene off, the O’Neills moved into a large, coral stone house called Southcote. Having completed Brown, O’Neill fell right back off the wagon and consequently neglected to sign the lease, a crime in Bermuda. When the landlady, Aunt Lilla Smith, arrived at their doorstep, for the second time, she was furious to be told, again, that Mr. O’Neill was sleeping. “You don’t seem to realize who my husband is,” Boulton said. “I don’t care who he is,” Smith snapped back. “I shall be back in the morning and if he doesn’t sign you can all get out.” When morning arrived, Smith was finally compelled, if with a sniff of haughty disapproval, to accept Boulton’s signature instead. (After attending a production of Desire Under the Elms, Smith was appalled the O’Neills had occupied her house at all.)¹⁷²

Jimmy Light arrived from New York on April 17 and stayed at Southcote with the O’Neills for nine days. His visit wasn’t without its tensions. After a disappointing season, Light was worried that the Triumvirate were shortchanging the Provincetown Playhouse to the advantage of the Greenwich Village Theatre (which they were). He’d also been annoyed that after he managed the uproar over All God’s Chillun, O’Neill promised him the director’s job for Desire Under the Elms but then reassigned the play to Bobby Jones just before rehearsals. At the time, O’Neill asked Light to take a walk with him and was visibly agitated, the sweat pouring down his face and neck. He informed him, albeit contritely, that he was offering the position to Jones because Jones was a New Hampshire native and understood the New England dialect better than Light, a Midwesterner. (It was the “because” that had rankled Light. He might as well have been disqualified from directing the Glencairn cycle “because” he’d never gone to sea.) Most likely as a result of these disputes, O’Neill declined to show his new “mask play” to one of the few people who might readily have comprehended it. Light would again be passed up for director in favor of Jones for The Great God Brown, but when he read the script later in New York, he greeted O’Neill’s concept for the masks with such eagerness that he was tasked with their design. O’Neill, Light wrote later in “The Parade of Masks,” had contrived to build on their earlier deployment of masks in Spook Sonata and Ancient Mariner and “violate” the millennia-old tradition of immutability. The masks in The Great God Brown would expose a character’s duality by their removal but also change hands and even transform over time. In this way, they would reveal the development of the characters’ exterior as well as interior selves. “The violation of the use of the mask,” Light said, “enabled O’Neill to dramatize the change of character in the protagonist and the antagonist in revealing their opposite developments by the removal by the actor of the mask. The actors’ make-up behind the mask, showed the new state of the character’s soul. Thus, there were two masks—one, the actor changed, and one the mask maker changed.”173

The play would also address what Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy identified as the central crisis of Western drama. Nietzsche compared the tensions that exist between internal desire and external reason with the conflict between the antithetical Greek gods Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, and Apollo, the sun god. As Greek tragedy developed from the openly imaginative work of Sophocles, Nietzsche contended, to the more temperamentally realistic and practical plays of Euripides, the Dionysian elements began to wane. Nietzsche thus argued for a rebalancing of the ecstatic beauty and structural moderation represented by Dionysus and Apollo, respectively. O’Neill would answer this call with The Great God Brown.

Dion Anthony, another O’Neill protagonist with strong autobiographical overtones, represents in name and personality the Dionysian side of Nietzsche’s duality, that of instinct and sensuality. Behind his mask, Dion’s actual face is, O’Neill writes, “dark, spiritual, poetic, passionately supersensitive, helplessly unprotected in its childlike, religious faith in life” (CP2, 475). O’Neill regarded this type of ascetic, moral face (his own) as requiring a mask’s cynical protection from outside view (also his own)—hence the last name, evoking the “masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity as represented by St. Anthony.”174 Dion’s friend, the straitlaced architect William Brown, with his lackluster name and professional ambition, represents Apollonian restraint and reason.

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, in a later profile for the New Republic, praised O’Neill’s innovative use of the mask for the stage, but also for what it reveals to us about the playwright’s own inner battle with the world: the mask, she wrote, “signifies to him more than a stage trick, or a screen interposed between the crucial self and the bleary public eye. It is an integral part of his character as an artist. For, as he once said, the world is not only blind to Dion, the man beneath the mask, it also condemns the mask of Pan. O’Neill has known and feared the world’s sneer. He responded for long by giving back to life a lurid and caustic picture of itself. A picture whose distortions—like those of the Chamber of Horrors—are never those of illusion; whose dreams are nightmares. But gradually, through a deepening of his own currents, the warfare between himself and life grew sterile. All his slings and arrows had not altered the duality of the world. All the slings and arrows of the world had not altered the duality of O’Neill.”¹⁷⁵

Dion in the play marries a woman named Margaret, who wears the mask of a wholesome American “good girl.” As with her namesake, Marguerite from Faust, which O’Neill had also read that spring, Margaret is so blinded by her desire to bear children that she encourages her husband’s transformation into a hardened misanthrope—the type of man that is materially and emotionally equipped to prosper in a cynical world. (Only a prostitute named Cybel accepts Dion’s unmasked persona.) They have three sons, but Dion’s lack of artistic success on his own terms, in contrast to his corporate triumphs as an architect at Brown’s firm, leads him to sink deeply into alcoholism. Over time, Dion’s Pan-god mask transforms into a twisted Mephistophelean leer, and he dies of alcoholism. Brown, who has secretly loved Margaret, claps on Dion’s mask and passes as his friend. But the mask proves too tormenting for Brown’s earthly inner self. After Brown’s first mask is mistaken for the murdered body of Brown himself, he’s gunned down by the police who, because of the mask exchange, believe he’s Brown’s alleged murderer Dion. Jimmy Light understood that the way in which Dion’s mask becomes, as O’Neill specified, “distorted by morality from Pan to Satan,” and is then climactically transferred to Brown, would make for an incredible theatrical accomplishment.176 The only question was whether they could make it work.

On the day Oona O’Neill was born, May 14, 1925, Kenneth Macgowan received a tongue-in-cheek notification: “It’s a goil. Allah be merciful. According to indications will be first lady announcer at Polo Grounds. Predict great future grand opera. Agnes and baby all serene.”¹⁷⁷ Macgowan sailed to Bermuda with Jones early that June, and O’Neill met them at the gangplank. After a swim at the beach below Southcote, O’Neill read them the opening scenes of The Great God Brown, noting in his diary that both were “much impressed.”¹⁷⁸ When Macgowan and Jones sailed for New York a week later with a typed copy of the script in hand, O’Neill felt emboldened, if only for a few days, to begin the scenario for an even grander departure. He’d first come up with an idea in 1923 of a woman obsessing over the loss of her husband, an aviator in World War I. At the time, O’Neill called it “Godfather,” but then gave it a new title, Strange Interlude.¹⁷⁹

On June 29, the O’Neills sailed back to New York on the Fort St. George, a contraband copy of James for obscenity, Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which had been banned in the United States for obscenity, buried deep in their luggage. Boulton then took Oona, Shane, and Gaga for the summer to the resort island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts; “Peaked Hill,” Boulton wrote Harold de Polo, “is a little too primitive for the baby.”¹⁸⁰ O’Neill stayed behind in New York at the Hotel Lafayette for a month of hobnobbing and hard drinking with friends and theater associates.

Paul Robeson, well aware of O’Neill’s taste for hot jazz, invited the playwright up to Harlem to swill liquor and take in the speakeasies with him and Experimental Theatre, Inc., member Harold McGee. It was the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and Robeson and McGee were in a celebratory mood. They were heading off that August for the London revival of The Emperor Jones with Robeson playing Jones, McGee managing the stage, and Jimmy Light directing. They caroused the Harlem clubs all night, and O’Neill wouldn’t climb into bed at the Lafayette until ten a.m. Head pounding with a hangover, he noted in his diary, “Up all night. Disaster.”181 (A couple of months later, O’Neill received something of a consolation prize, if one needs such a thing after clubbing in Harlem with Paul Robeson in 1925: Jimmy Light cabled from London on September 11 that The Emperor Jones was a “big hit.”)¹⁸²

O’Neill reunited with his family in Nantucket that August for a month of ostensible reform. After a week in the modest clapboard cottage at 5 Mill Street, his diary reads, “On the wagon,” then a few days of nothing until, “Off! But not serious.”¹⁸³ He’d found it impossible to work in New York, but Nantucket wasn’t much better. Ed Keefe arrived from New London only to discover that Boulton had no idea where her husband was. Keefe eventually hunted him down and brought him to a friend’s schooner where they sat up drinking all night. Keefe fell asleep but was startled awake by a sailor shouting that a man had fallen overboard. They fished O’Neill out of the harbor, drenched and flailing helplessly. After he’d slept it off, Boulton arrived in a rowboat and paddled him home.¹⁸⁴ Despite such relapses, O’Neill was able to revise The Fountain, which he’d started in 1922, and expand his scenario for Strange Interlude.

On his way back to New York in early October, O’Neill took off on another “bust” during a stopover in New London. He’d first looked in on Monte Cristo Cottage, sorrowfully describing the scene: “Decay + ruin—sad.”¹⁸⁵ Wanting to get drunk, he met up with Art McGinley’s brother Tom, Ed Keefe, Doc Ganey, “and the rest of the corrupt herd” for lunch at the Thames Club on State Street. It was a reunion of sorts of the old Second Story Club, and from there they “embarked on a debauch” through the night, “everyone blotto,” that wrapped up at Doc Ganey’s, where O’Neill passed out cold. (“They are much too swift for me in New London these days,” he joked to Art McGinley a couple of years later. “I am glad to have moved to a clime [Bermuda] where they take things easier.”)¹⁸⁶ “You know,” O’Neill told Doc Ganey before losing consciousness, “I always wanted to make money. My motive was to be able, someday, to hire a tally-ho and fill it full of painted whores, load each whore with a bushel of dimes and let them throw the money to the rabble on a Saturday afternoon; we’d ride down State Street and toss money to people like the Chappells. Now that I’ve made as much as I need, I’ve lost interest.”187

O’Neill temporarily placed Strange Interlude on the shelf that autumn at Brook Farm. Instead, he worked on a new play, Lazarus Laughed, and cleaned up The Fountain for its mid-December premiere. He drank heavily on the nights when he attended rehearsals for The Fountain in New York. By then, he’d become sickened by the play, by the whole business of playwriting, in fact. On the night of November 23, 1925, he drowned his misery on yet another “bust,” this time with Mary Blair and her husband, Edmund Wilson. The Experimental Theatre, Inc., had produced Wilson’s play The Crime in the Whistler Room the previous season as a favor to Blair, who starred in it; after that O’Neill didn’t encourage “Bunny,” as the literary critic was known, to go any further with playwriting. Wilson could be critical of O’Neill’s work too, even if his wife was then considered “the O’Neill actress,” but he still admired his talent for “drawing music from humble people.”¹⁸⁸

O’Neill stayed on at their place until four a.m., emptying the apartment of Scotch and rambling on about topics ranging from the plays of Sophocles to the louche behavior of the actresses of his father’s generation to the homosexual tendencies of sailors. “O’Neill had a peculiar point of view on the homosexual activities of the sailors he’d known on shipboard,” Wilson recalled of their conversation that night: “He thought that in degrading themselves by submitting to the demands of other sailors, they were always trying to atone for some wrong which was on their conscience.” (At the time, in fact, O’Neill was planning to write a play about what he’d witnessed firsthand of sailors’ homosexual relations during his time with the merchant marine, but only have it printed for private consumption; as far as is known, he abandoned the idea.)¹⁸⁹

The next day, dog-tired and profoundly hungover, O’Neill stumbled into the Greenwich Village Theatre for yet another dismal Fountain rehearsal. This time, he left so “disgusted” that he traveled uptown to commiserate with Jimmy Light at his flat on East Seventy-Eighth Street.190 Light was then designing the masks for The Great God Brown production at the Greenwich Village Theatre while at the same time trying to keep the Provincetown Playhouse afloat with Fitzie Fitzgerald. (The Triumvirate had found it too unwieldy to run two theaters at once, so they’d gratefully handed over the reins to their colleagues.)

Light welcomed O’Neill into his home that afternoon, he remembered, as “a friend with whom he could say what he wanted and needed to say.”¹⁹¹ O’Neill hadn’t written a word in nearly two weeks, and he made a startling admission: after striving as a dramatist for more than a decade, he was through. He would become a novelist. “Crowding a drama into a play,” he told Light, “is like getting an elephant to dance in a tub.”¹⁹² The analogy must have brought to Light’s mind the time when Walter Huston was overacting as Ephraim Cabot at rehearsals for Desire Under the Elms; O’Neill had, with his typical breviloquence, instructed the seasoned performer, “Walter, don’t help the elephant to walk.”¹⁹³ (This metaphor would also come back to taunt O’Neill when the writer Mary McCarthy, in her devastating takedown of The Iceman Cometh, compared him with other contemporary American writers such as Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, whose works “can find no reason for stopping, but go on and on, like elephants pacing in a zoo.”)¹⁹⁴

O’Neill’s dissatisfaction with drama wasn’t news to Light. He’d generally written his plays to be read like novels anyway; how they’d appear in print was oftentimes more important to him than how they’d appear in front of the footlight. But his determination to write novels instead of plays was news, and it raised questions about why he wished to and how it would affect his writing in the years to come. Of course, he’d already tried to blend drama and fiction with Beyond the Horizon and Chris: the latter, O’Neill said just after its production, “was a special play, a technical experiment by which I tried to compress the theme for a novel into play form without losing the flavor of the novel. The attempt failed.” And while writing Beyond the Horizon, he said, “I dreamed of wedding the theme for a novel to the play form in a way that would still leave the play master of the house. I still dream of it.” O’Neill wondered at the time if “such a bastard form deserved to fail,” whether he’d been “attempting the impossible.”195 Light transcribed this conversation as an addendum to his unpublished essay “The Parade of Masks,” a previously unknown document that illuminates O’Neill’s otherwise shadowed motives for abandoning plays; it is, therefore, invaluable for understanding nearly all his work from The Great God Brown onward.¹⁹⁶

Not one of his plays up to then, he told Light, had given him any real sense of satisfaction by the time it went into production. “When I first have the idea,” he said, “it is a blazing fire. When I have written it, it is glowing coals. When it is rehearsed and acted, it is warm embers. When an audience sees it, it is ashes.”¹⁹⁷ Gone were the days of the Greeks, of Shakespeare, of the romanticists. The dramatist’s job now was merely “getting his character onto the stage and letting him unpack his trunk.”¹⁹⁸ O’Neill’s bottom line was that modern realism had rendered soliloquies obsolete; the soliloquy was now considered a worn-out throwback that made characters seem like mere symbols rather than actual human beings. What theatrical device, then, was left to express true conflict, the psychic pain and inner language of the speaker? O’Neill’s imagination was ill served by “kitchen sink” realism because its most vital edict is the “fourth-wall illusion”—the idea that characters must disregard the audience as if there were a fourth wall standing between them. Hence the soliloquy was consigned to Shakespeare and hack melodrama. No sane person looks off into the distance and bares his soul, just as actual people don’t randomly break into song and dance as they do in musical theater. To make a connection with the audience, the dialogue must be “natural.” Light neatly summed up O’Neill’s grounds for reverting to the novel this way:

The arena of vital action, the island of immediacy the dramatist certainly has, but the submerged mountain holding it up to the present remains submerged. To disclose this submerged foundation, the dramatist only has the soliloquy. But the soliloquy is in the dramatic warehouse relegated there by modern realism. … The novelist as God, as reporter, as surrogate for the hero has both exterior and interior command of his work. The dramatist has only exterior command[;] what interior life of his characters he can reveal to his audience must flash through the palings of the stockade enclosing him. Providing he remains true to his theme and his character, the choice open to the novelist is wide. Philosophy, social comment, descriptions of nature, human moods, satire, even dramatics, all and almost everyone, are allowable in a novelist’s medium. Though he has as deep and inevitable insight, as revealing an interpretation of the human condition as the novelist, the dramatist’s effect is achieved by song-and-echo, blow-and-impact, fight-and-victory, whereas with the same human material the novelist has built a cathedral or at least a chapel of the understanding.199

O’Neill had already written four works of fiction—“Tomorrow,” “The Screenews of War,” S.O.S., and the lost “The Hairy Ape.” But aside from “Tomorrow,” the others were meant as moneymakers, not truth seekers. Even “Tomorrow” struck O’Neill as “inferior stuff not worth republishing” when Boni and Liveright asked permission to rerelease it.²⁰⁰ Therein lay the problem: O’Neill knew he was a bad hand at writing fiction, as bad as Mark Twain was at drama. Probably worse. (Agnes Boulton could write fiction well, which must partly explain why, subconsciously at least, he’d tossed her manuscript into the fire at Brook Farm—envy.) Now genreless for a time, a creative standstill ensued that would last for over eighty days. After The Great God Brown, a new O’Neill play wouldn’t be staged for two years. But in the years to follow O’Neill’s abiding wish to converge fiction with drama would come to define his unique dramatic voice.²⁰¹

At Brook Farm that fall, 1925, O’Neill mostly read, chopped wood, trimmed trees, and took long hikes through the woods with Boulton in a mutually desired but doomed attempt to repair their widening rift. Nothing lightened his mood. “Too bored,” he wrote in his diary, “R’field is no home for me! Dull as hell.” He even got bored with his diary: “Read. Worked in woods … Ditto … Ditto … Ditto … Ditto …” These lackadaisical notations are only interrupted on December 10, the day The Fountain opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre, “Alas!” “Refused to look at any [Fountain] notices,” he entered the next day. “I know how bad they must be.”202

The Fountain charts the ill-fated expedition of the Spanish colonialist Juan Ponce de León after he’d signed on with Christopher Columbus for the famed explorer’s second voyage to the New World. Robert Edmond Jones designed breathtaking sets for the exotic locales and engineered a series of equally arresting sound and lighting effects. Given The Fountain’s extravagant time shifts (stretching over a twenty-year period), enormous cast, and demanding scene changes—Moorish and Spanish courtyards in Spain and Puerto Rico, a Florida beach and jungle, and a monastery in Cuba—Jones’s accomplishment, if not necessarily O’Neill’s, was extraordinary.

Although O’Neill refused to look at reviews of The Fountain, he might’ve been surprised that more than a few were appreciative; the bulk of them nevertheless echoed the sentiments of Gilbert W. Gabriel of the Sun, who wrote, “Ponce de Leon and his coming to Florida, that land which has passed from the Spanish brethren to the Marx Brothers, are merely pegs on which to drape the pity of man’s everlasting legend of a spring of eternal youth. They are voluminous drapes and they draggle.” No reviewer, however, came close to abhorring the play as much as O’Neill himself. By the time of its opening, he’d lost interest in anything to do with the production and turned his full attention to The Great God Brown, a play that, he promised, was “worth a dozen Fountains.”²⁰³

On December 27, O’Neill was offered “a ray of hope amid general sick despair.” Kenneth Macgowan, after a Scotch-soaked evening at Brook Farm, had intervened in his friend’s debilitating alcohol problem by scheduling him an appointment with a top psychiatrist, Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton. The morning after his night with Macgowan, during which he’d polished off no less than a full bottle of Scotch, O’Neill again began his method of tapering off—five drinks the first day, then three, then one. On New Year’s Eve, 1925, he wrote, “On wagon. Good’bye—without regret—1925 (except for a few mos. In Bermuda).” His diary entry for New Year’s Day, 1926, greets the year with the hopeful exhortation, “Welcome in a new dawn, & pray!”204

To get a handle on the severity of his new patient’s condition, Dr. Hamilton asked Boulton to jot down a summary of O’Neill’s drinking patterns over the past year and a half. (The resulting document, incidentally, plainly shows that her husband had lied to her about the extent of his drinking over the fall and early winter on his visits to New York.) O’Neill and Boulton also agreed to take part in an ambitious study on marriage the psychiatrist had been conducting. In the book that resulted from dozens of similar interviews, A Research in Marriage (1929), which also includes data samples from Macgowan and his wife, Edna, Hamilton distilled his conclusions from anonymous statistical data, so it’s difficult to parse what O’Neill and Boulton contributed to the study themselves (though in the column “Sources of [Marital] Friction for Which Mothers Were Blamed,” only one participant listed “Mother’s drug habit”).²⁰⁵ Hamilton burrowed deeper into the cause of O’Neill’s alcoholism than anyone had before, at one point asking him to pencil out his psychoanalytic diagram of his childhood development. O’Neill obliged, and the diagram clearly shows his resentment of his mother’s emotional absence, his loss of admiration for his father, the trauma of his nanny Sarah Sandy’s horror stories, and his feelings of abandonment at having been thrust into boarding school before his seventh birthday.

Hamilton’s final diagnosis for O’Neill wasn’t especially enlightening: an acute Oedipus complex. “Why, all he had to do was read my plays,” O’Neill deadpanned.²⁰⁶ Perhaps less obvious, though a clear undercurrent in his dramas, was the verdict of psychiatrist Dr. Louis E. Bisch, a neighbor in Bermuda. Over the previous summer O’Neill had consulted with Dr. Bisch, who prescribed him veronal, seemingly unaware of his patient’s history with the drug, to help counter his alcohol-induced insomnia. On O’Neill’s thirty-seventh birthday, October 16, 1925, Bisch trundled out to Brook Farm for a visit, during which, O’Neill noted, they shared “much talk about divorce.”²⁰⁷ After meeting with him several times, Bisch concluded that “O’Neill had an unconscious homosexual attraction toward his father, which he carried over to some of his friendships for men. His antagonism toward his mother carried over to his relationships with women; because his mother had failed him, all women would fail him, and he had to take revenge on them. All women had to be punished.”208

That he was Irish didn’t help with the drinking either. By the mid-twentieth century, the Irish in America were statistically proven to be twenty-five times more likely to succumb to alcoholism than any other American group; as one priest described it, aptly for O’Neill, “The characteristic Irish alcoholic syndrome is of the compulsive perfectionist who feels that he has never been loved for who he is but only for what he can do.”²⁰⁹

The degree of Hamilton’s helpfulness to O’Neill was probably negligible. “Gene liked Hamilton personally,” Boulton said later, while debunking the doctor’s presumed success, “but was not helped by him in his drinking problem.”²¹⁰ Whatever credit Hamilton deserves or doesn’t, O’Neill knew he’d arrived at a physical and emotional impasse. His cycle of drunkenness, elevation, violence, and despair would cease only when he’d “convinced” himself, as his Provincetown friend Harry Kemp put it, “that alcohol is no friend to creative writing—is nobody’s friend and soon a bad master.”²¹¹ O’Neill could dedicate his adult years to whiskey, as his brother had, or to writing, as he’d tried to do, but together they were unsustainable. And on that New Year’s Eve, he believed he had, at long last, conquered his seemingly unconquerable illness.

The Great God Brown opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on January 23, 1926, and the Triumvirate took preemptive action on what they were certain would be a hard-nosed critical response to the enigmatic play: on the day of the premiere, they rushed the script to a team of transcribers, then forwarded the newly typed pages to key reviewers so they’d have a copy in hand while mulling over their critiques; additionally, they chose a Saturday night for the opening to allow the reviewers all day Sunday without the usual pressure of a tight deadline. Many scenes in Brown equally confounded the actors; and even their metteur en scène, Bobby Jones, betrayed a lack of comprehension about O’Neill’s intent with the play. Leona Hogarth, who played Margaret Anthony, complained that Jones had failed to make the roles “intelligible” to his cast, saying that “there was so much talk of overtones and subtle meanings that the cast was tied up tight as knots.” The scene where Dion and William’s masks change hands, Hogarth said, “was always obscure and the more Jones tried to explain it the more clouded it grew.”212

In the days that followed Brown’s premiere, the inevitable public confusion led O’Neill to “put himself on the dock” once again and print an explanation: the play, he wrote, represents a “mystical pattern which manifests itself as an overtone … dimly behind and beyond the words.” “[William] Brown,” he continued, “is the visionless demi-god of our new materialistic myth—a Success—building his life of exterior things, inwardly empty and resourceless, an uncreative creature of superficial preordained social grooves, a by-product forced aside into slack waters by the deep main current of life-desire. … Brown has always envied the creative life force in Dion—what he himself lacks.”²¹³ Immediately after its release, O’Neill wondered if he should write “an explanation regarding this explanation.” But it wasn’t necessary. The consensus was that O’Neill had overreached with this oddity, but brilliantly. The Post regarded Brown as “a superb failure. … He has poured into it more than the stage can hold. His imagination has soared on wax wings too near the sun of dramatic illusion and, though he comes tumbling from the skies, it is a brilliant and thrilling fall, since he has dared greater heights than any other.” Brooks Atkinson, the Times’s new critic, agreed but added that O’Neill “puts a responsibility upon his audience too great and far too flattering.”²¹⁴

O’Neill was heartened by the notices on the whole, but it irked him that so many critics designated him as “high brow,” an elitist label he loathed. “I write from the back wall of the theatre,” he protested. “I’m not high brow.” But for all the masks and expressionism, symbolism and philosophy, theology and psychology, The Great God Brown was a tremendous popular success and moved uptown, first to the Garrick Theatre, and then to the Klaw Theatre, for a total of eight months in New York—an incredible run for an experimental play. “I shall always regard this as the one miracle that ever happened in New York theatre!” O’Neill said, as he looked back in wonder nearly two decades later.215 Indeed, a rumor circulated around Broadway that two shopgirls were overheard commenting on Brown in the lobby: the first turned to her companion and said, “Gee, it’s awful artistic, ain’t it?” The other replied, “Yes, but it’s good all the same.”²¹⁶

Leona Hogarth and Robert Keith as Margaret and Dion Anthony in the Triumvirate’s 1926 premiere of The Great God Brown.

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

“Old Doc” at Loon Lodge

The O’Neills again left “dull as hell” Brook Farm behind them and returned to Bermuda in February of 1926. The first home they rented was a stately eighteenth-century manor called Bellevue, a hilarious irony, O’Neill thought, given its namesake, the world-renowned psychiatric hospital in New York, where he felt he and his family really belonged.217 Located in blissful isolation on the south shore of Paget East, the newly constructed mansion featured wraparound columned porches on both levels and lush tropical grounds that sloped down to Grape Bay beach. The O’Neills wanted to lease it for several years, but that fell through, and they soon found a waterfront property for sale named Spithead in Warwick Parish. Spithead, a fortress-like pink stone sanctuary with a panoramic view of Hamilton Harbour and twenty-five acres of land, was built around 1780 by the British privateer Hezekiah Frith. The current owner hadn’t been to the house since before the war, and the neglect showed. Its stone wharf was crumbling, and the ceilings between floors were cracked and rotted through. But after obtaining the Bermudan government’s permission, the O’Neills made an offer of about $17,000, which was duly accepted.²¹⁸

O’Neill returned to writing for the first time in months, invigorated with a renewed hope to push through Lazarus Laughed, which he completed at Bellevue that spring. Strange Interlude was next. (Other ideas had begun knocking around in his head as well; one of these, another mask play, which he never finished, was to be a condemnation of America’s mob mentality with a protagonist named Mob, “a Jones but white.”)²¹⁹ He also received the proofs of Barrett Clark’s biography.

At first, the prospect of Clark writing the earliest chronicle of his life had thrilled him, but the final product was dispiriting. The book was sketchy and incomplete, and yet at the same time too long. Clark read his plays well, but he seemed incapable of writing “a more concise and interest-catching” tale about his life. Worst of all, O’Neill didn’t see the least resemblance between himself and the man described: “It isn’t I. And the truth would make such a much more interesting—and incredible!—legend. That is what makes me melancholy. But I see no hope for this except someday to shame the devil myself, if I ever can muster the requisite interest—and nerve—simultaneously!”220

Spithead, O’Neill’s home in Bermuda.

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

By June the island climate had again lifted his spirits. “It’s getting pretty hot down here now but the bathing is the most wonderful you can imagine,” he wrote his father-in-law Teddy Boulton, who was then convalescing from an advanced case of tuberculosis at Shelton (the public-funded sanatorium where O’Neill was briefly treated in December 1912). “The water is so warm and the air so soft that you can sport around in the water and on the beach in the moonlight as pleasurably as in sunlight. Shane is in the water all the time and Oona wades about in it.” “I’ve found Bermuda hits me better than any spot heretofore,” he wrote Hart Crane. “I can relax … get rid of nerves, be more free myself—and still keep from losing the needful pep.”²²¹

Once he’d turned his complete attention to Strange Interlude, O’Neill started to problem-solve yet again over what must be done to compensate for demise of the soliloquy. He was especially inspired by Theodore Dreiser’s recent An American Tragedy (1925), America’s most talked-about literary event of the year; Dreiser’s epic novel revolved, O’Neill said, around an “unexceptional man,” whereas he would compose a “novel in dramatic form of an exceptional woman.”222 This idea would make for a play of “revolutionary” length—perhaps the longest play in modern memory—which would approach in dramatic form “a novel’s comprehensiveness.”²²³ Having accepted, since his evening with Jimmy Light, that fiction was not his métier, O’Neill still groped for a theatrical equivalent for the novelist’s access to inner thoughts. This would ultimately come through best, in the years to come, by making his characters drunk, high on drugs, or very hungover—the “in vino veritas” that informs the inner voices of his late plays A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey, Hughie, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.²²⁴ But other methods were tried first.

With Spithead undergoing renovations, O’Neill knew that he would require an anonymous summer retreat to write Strange Interlude and, just as important, retain his hard-won sobriety. Provincetown was out of the question. Carlin, Harry Kemp, Frank Shay, and other hardcore inebriates were still there and swilling more rotgut than ever. “Not that I’m afraid anymore,” he told Macgowan, “but it’s no use making it harder for oneself.”²²⁵ On the recommendation of Richard Madden’s partner, the theatrical agent Elizabeth “Bess” Marbury, the O’Neills settled on Belgrade Lakes, Maine, and on June 15, they sailed back to New York, then headed north to New England.

On June 23 in New Haven, Connecticut, at Yale University’s commencement ceremony, “Gene” O’Neill, the college dropout, became Dr. Eugene Gladstone O’Neill. He’d been awarded an honorary doctorate of literature. “Old Doc,” he mused. “O’Neill, the Yale grad.” (The honor, he joked, was likely a gesture of retroactive gratitude from the hallowed university for his decision to attend Princeton and Harvard instead of Yale.)²²⁶ Yale’s press release for the event stated that O’Neill had been chosen for his role “as a creative contributor of new and moving forms to one of the oldest of arts, as the first American playwright to receive both wide and serious recognition upon the stage of Europe.”227 But O’Neill also knew what, or more precisely who, was the motivating force behind the pick.

The year before, 1925, his old playwriting professor George Pierce Baker had left Harvard to head Yale’s Department of Theatre, and one of his first acts in office was to lobby for O’Neill to be granted the award. “Eugene O’Neill today,” Baker asserted in the Yale Review, “is the best known in other countries of all our dramatists. Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Paris, London, Rome—all capitals of Europe have seen his finest plays.”²²⁸ (O’Neill was convinced at the time that his soaring popularity across the Atlantic was largely because the Europeans believed he was actually from Ireland.)²²⁹ “Coming from Yale,” O’Neill had replied to the university’s offer in May, “I appreciate that this [degree] is a true honor … and hope that this recognition of my work really should have a genuine significance for all those who are trying, as I am, to do original, imaginative work for the theater.”²³⁰

O’Neill was seated near a fellow honoree, the secretary of the treasury and billionaire industrialist Andrew W. Mellon. O’Neill glanced over at Mellon and saw, he said, “the epitome of the cold banker. You couldn’t read anything there. What a cold face, what cold piercing eyes!” In his introductory remarks, Professor William Lyon Phelps pronounced that O’Neill was “the only American dramatist who has produced a deep impression on European drama and European thought. … He has redeemed the American theater from commonplaceness and triviality.” When O’Neill rose from his seat to accept the award, he looked across the lawn in astonishment as the newly minted graduates exploded into a “tremendous ovation.”²³¹

After the post-ceremony formalities, O’Neill drove his family in their Packard touring car along the Connecticut coastline fifty miles northeast to New London. While there he watched the long-venerated Harvard-Yale regatta on the Thames and rooted for the blue-shirted oarsmen of his new alma mater. In a thrilling win, Yale’s varsity eight-man crew crossed the line ahead of Harvard’s crimson-shirted heavyweights by a boat length (a hairsbreadth distance over the brutal four-mile course). O’Neill had covered “Boat Day” back in 1912 when he was a reporter for the Telegraph, but he decided then that the venerated regatta, the longest-running rowing race in the nation, would be the ideal setting for the final scene of Strange Interlude.

O’Neill left Boulton at the hotel with the children and steered the Packard, “very slowly and reminiscently,” he wrote Jessica Rippin afterward, down to 325 Pequot Avenue. Grimly looking up the hill at the dilapidated Monte Cristo Cottage, he kept driving. The Rippin house looked dark, so he continued on for the mile or so to Ocean Beach. This too was a pitiful sight. The town had decided to imitate the flash of Coney Island, and the “atrocities committed at the beach,” as far as he was concerned, had cheapened the beloved haunt of his youth.232

On July 1, O’Neill maneuvered the Packard through the pines, farmland, and blueberry hills of inland Maine and down into the village of Belgrade Lakes. Their first stop was a real estate office and general store run by Ervin Bean (brother of clothing magnate L. L. Bean) and a local named Ken Bartlett to inquire about a summer residence. Few of the Belgrade locals had ever heard of Eugene O’Neill; if they had, Bartlett said later, “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.” The O’Neills considered the first cottages Bean showed them “dumps” and much too small for the family’s extended stay.²³³ Finally Bean located a suitable rental on Rupus Lane, less than a mile down the road from the village. A two-story rustic log cabin, spacious inside but perpetually dark from the surrounding pines, Loon Lodge, as it’s still known, occupies a shadowy lot on the western shore of Great Pond. Loon Lodge, O’Neill, joked, perfect: “This, after living in ‘Bellevue’ all winter, makes me suspect that God is becoming a symbolist or something!” But after a week, despite the cabin’s ironic association with madness, “I remain not only sane but also sober.”²³⁴

Sobriety was as trying as ever. Each time O’Neill went on the wagon, he rediscovered the chief reason he ever really drank in the first place: the effects of alcohol, even during the worst of his almighty hangovers, simply made him feel less alone. Drunkenness had been his closest companion for over twenty years, he told Macgowan, and although he didn’t “feel any desire to drink whatever,” his clear-headedness deepened his feeling of isolation: “I rather feel the void left by those companionable or (even when most horrible) intensely dramatic phantoms and obsessions, which, with caressing claws in my heart and brain, used to lead me for weeks at a time, otherwise lonely, down the ever-changing vistas of that No-Mans-Land lying between the D.T.s and Reality as we suppose it. But I reckon that, having now been ‘on the wagon’ for a longer time—a good deal—than ever before since I started drinking at 15, I have a vague feeling of maladjustment to this ‘cleaner, greener land’ somewhere inside me. … One feels so normal with so little to be normal about. One misses playing solitaire with one’s scales.”235

O’Neill’s cavernous feelings of self-alienation weren’t lost on the two New York reporters granted permission to drive up and interview him. David Karsner, the Call columnist who’d championed the politics of The Hairy Ape, interviewed him that summer for a Herald Tribune feature story in which Karsner admitted that, while they talked on the wide porch overlooking Great Pond, the “playwright … did not disturb me at all, but the man disturbed me much. It was what gave those eyes of his their burning luster and what contributed to his intense, almost jerky exterior that mattered.”²³⁶ Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who interviewed him for her New Republic profile, concluded her piece, “When O’Neill steps lightly along some pagan shore with Shane, he walks a little behind, a tall figure, in a bathing-suit, with limbs burnt to a pagan blackness; and on his face the look, not of a ‘father,’ but of some trusting elder child who has grown up into a strange world.” Sergeant further considered the effect this personality had on his work: “Always thus hiding, always thus revealing himself, this Irish-American mystic, with his strange duality of being, has made his plays a projection of his struggles with the unmanageable universe. Their power and their tension of his taut spirit, which are ever trying, like a pair of acrobats, to transcend themselves. Even the plays that fail to convince have a way of piercing the spectator in the ribs with some blade of vital truth. Those who are looking for diversion in the theatre cannot endure O’Neill’s stark and desperate revelations.”237 (That March and April 1927, Shepley would spend six weeks at Spithead recovering from an automobile accident; this was just after her article appeared, and O’Neill told her it was “the best thing ever done about me. The others have been pretty dull and lame. Yours is the only one!”)²³⁸

“You don’t like me, do you?” O’Neill remarked that July 15 to the shadowy-eyed woman accompanying him down to Bess Marbury’s bathhouse. “You’re the rudest man I’ve ever met,” came an icy reply from the actress Carlotta Monterey. “When I went into that play of yours [The Hairy Ape], I didn’t want to. I had just finished one thing and wanted to go out to California and see my mother and daughter. But Hoppy [Arthur Hopkins] kept after me, so I did, with hardly a rehearsal, and you never had the decency to thank me.” (Monterey had every reason to feel this way; O’Neill, after being introduced to her by Jimmy Light, turned to him and said, “What a dumb bitch she is.”)²³⁹ Only a couple of months younger than O’Neill, Monterey was no longer the ingénue of eighteen when she’d become 1907’s Miss California and a Miss America runner-up. But her great beauty made an impression at Belgrade Lakes, especially in her bathing suit. (Boulton’s daughter Barbara recalled her wearing a “boyish white wool bathing suit with no overskirt such as suits usually had,” which revealed far more of her anatomy than just her legs.)²⁴⁰

The previous spring, Monterey, née Hazel Neilson Tharsing (a change from her Danish name to accentuate her Spanish-style allure), had married and then promptly divorced the man-about-town New Yorker caricaturist Ralph Barton. She believed that Barton, her third husband, was a drunkard who’d wasted his talent cavorting with celebrities and hosting all-night parties. Her first husband, the Scottish lawyer and California mining speculator John Moffat, was nine years older than she; her second, the law student Melvin C. Chapman, was seven years younger. Moffat lost access to his fortune when World War I shut down the banks in England, and Monterey claimed that he’d almost fired a gun at her and once threatened to commit suicide by jumping from their hotel window. Chapman she’d only married, she informed him soon after their breakup, to get pregnant. They did have a child, Cynthia Jane Chapman, in 1917, but Monterey left her in California in the care of her mother, Nellie Tharsing, and moved to New York to pursue her career on the stage. Meanwhile, Monterey conducted a long-standing affair with a hoary Wall Street banker named James Speyer. Speyer, whom she referred to as “Papa,” worshiped Monterey, and though their relationship had apparently ceased being sexual, he ensured her financial security with a trust that would supply her with a $14,000 annuity for the rest of her life.241

After Monterey’s divorce from Ralph Barton had been finalized that spring, she’d been invited for the summer to Bess Marbury’s residence on Upper Long Pond, about a mile from Loon Lodge. Making up in ambition what she might have lacked in talent, Monterey considered time spent with the illustrious theatrical agent a professional coup that might get her back on the stage. Marbury was a portly seventy-year-old woman with a list of renowned clientele, past and present, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. (The talk of Broadway had it that Marbury preferred the company of her own sex. According to Boulton, O’Neill at first thought that Monterey was Marbury’s lover; when Boulton said she didn’t think so, he responded, “You’re so naïve.”)²⁴² Marbury’s household was thus a step up for a second-tier actress like Monterey. Nevertheless, she’d resolved to welcome “the Great O’Neill” with a stony silence.

Agnes Boulton stepped out of the Packard with O’Neill and straightaway inquired about Monterey’s sex life. “I have no sex life,” Monterey replied, offended. “I’ve just been divorced.” “Oh, but you must have a lover! Don’t you have a lover?” No.

Boulton and Marbury dominated the conversation that afternoon, with O’Neill and Monterey deathly silent. After a time, Marbury took note of the awkwardness between them and instructed Monterey to accompany the playwright to the boathouse and find him a swimsuit. Monterey herself had an intense phobia of water from the time that her father, Christian Tharsing, had thrown her headlong into the glacially cold Pacific in a bungled attempt at teaching her to swim. Her hauteur softened a bit when she beheld O’Neill emerge from the bathhouse clad in an ill-fitting woman’s suit, then lunge, unselfconsciously, into Long Pond. Her icy demeanor thawed yet more after O’Neill apologized about their “moment’s introduction” at the Plymouth Theatre in 1922; he’d been overwhelmed with grief, he explained, over his mother’s recent death.243 Monterey may not have shared his love of water, but they both—O’Neill feeling as lost without alcohol’s “phantoms and obsessions” as Monterey did after her recent divorce from Ralph Barton—felt very alone.

Shane O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill, and Carlotta Monterey at Belgrade Lakes, Maine, in the summer of 1926.

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

O’Neill’s favorite activity that summer was paddling his canoe over to the majestic home of the actress Florence Reed and her husband, Malcolm Williams, a half mile north along Great Pond’s edge from Loon Lodge. Their property included a wide lakefront lawn and dock area where he could relax, sip tea, and enjoy hours of genial conversation, uninterrupted by shouting children, the smell of cooking, and other domestic annoyances. He was desperate for male companionship, and he and Malcolm Williams swiftly became friends. When Monterey was visiting their home with Bess Marbury and discovered O’Neill there, she “accidentally” left her scarf behind. Reed was about to ask her maid to return it, when Williams said, “Don’t bother, she won’t thank you for it. She’ll be back for it herself tomorrow, when Gene’s here.”244

Monterey soon visited him and his family at Loon Lodge and occasionally went canoeing with O’Neill. Reed remembered that the O’Neills’ lodge smelled of “diapers and lamb stew,” to the disgust of Monterey, who always made it a point to keep her living spaces, including Bess Marbury’s that summer, utterly immaculate.²⁴⁵ Boulton ignored such trifles on the whole and recalled more generally of Monterey’s advances on her husband, “I didn’t worry about him because she didn’t seem smart enough for him. It seemed to me he was more amused by her than anything else.” But then again, she added musingly, O’Neill did say that Monterey had eyes just like his mother’s.²⁴⁶

O’Neill, to combat his post-alcohol doldrums, took advantage of every diversion that drew tourists to Belgrade Lakes each summer by the thousands—swimming, boating, fishing, and aimlessly driving through the countryside. “The Lakes are fine,” he wrote Macgowan, “and we have a good camp, good rowboat & canoe and fish abound. … Eugene is here & Barbara so we’re a fat family.” He took swims several times a day, often across from Loon Lodge to Abena Point and back. Eugene Jr., who was then sixteen, and Barbara Burton, eleven, were there for July and much of August. During this time Barbara plunged “madly in love” with her stepfather’s good-looking namesake, “so dashing and handsome and full of exuberance.”²⁴⁷

Eugene, Barbara, and Shane held competitions to see how many perch they could catch; the withdrawn six-year-old Shane, happy to sit alone and wait patiently for a bite, usually won. Eugene, now an honor student at the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx, dreamed of attending Yale. While at Loon Lodge, he befriended an equally well-read boy of his age named Frank Meyer, who was surprised to find himself discussing life and literature with the likes of Eugene O’Neill. “I found him very kind and gentle,” Meyer recalled. “What I especially liked was that he talked to you as an equal, none of that talking down because you were a kid.” At one point, he said, “we talked about Freud. I remember in particular our discussing puns and slips of the tongue in connection with the unconscious.”248

Shane and Oona’s clamoring needs, on the other hand, though they were no different from other children their age, had become nearly intolerable to O’Neill. “Perhaps I could do with less progeny about,” O’Neill said, “for I was never cut out, seemingly, for a pater familias and children in squads, even when indubitably my own, tend to ‘get my goat.’”²⁴⁹ To offer her husband a semblance of privacy, Boulton arranged for local builders to construct a makeshift shack close to the water’s edge.²⁵⁰ After several morning hours of frustratingly slow progress on Strange Interlude, he’d emerge from his shack and, unable to face the racket in the main house, plunge into Great Pond for a long swim. Only afterward could he relax and enjoy lunch with his family.

Harold de Polo rented a cottage in Maine about a hundred miles away at Lake Kezar, and O’Neill invited him over in early September to teach him bass fishing. “Come on along, kid,” he wrote his old friend, “and show me something about bass.” O’Neill, de Polo, and Boulton went night fishing off an island across from Loon Lodge, and O’Neill was a determined student, ignoring the sparkling northern lights that left Boulton and de Polo entranced. Time spent with O’Neill always reminded de Polo of a popular cartoon: two British youths are looking at Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps. “Not bad,” one mumbles. “Don’t be so demmed enthusiastic,” the other yawns. “Purty?” de Polo asked, quoting from Desire Under the Elms. “Ay-eh,” O’Neill responded, also from the script, then he struck a bass. “How about it,” de Polo asked, “ain’t it the grandest sport in the world? … Ain’t it got all the thrills—” “Yeah,” O’Neill said and cast his rod again.²⁵¹

De Polo was still drinking a good deal but admired his friend’s resolve to quit. He later remembered that instead of bourbon, their usual, they drank glasses of milk while warming up at the fireplace and ate can after can of “exceptionally sweet figs in syrup which Gene seemed very much to like.” When the O’Neills agreed to try their luck fishing at Lake Kezar, de Polo phoned Helen and told her to stock up on figs. During the O’Neills’ visit, while they sat around the fireplace and the two men tucked into their milk and figs, Boulton burst out laughing: “Two old topers drinking milk and eating figs in sweet syrup! My God, what would the boys in the Hell-Hole say?”252 O’Neill smiled wanly, then reached behind him for a copy of The Great God Brown, signed it, handed it to his friend, and told him to read it out loud, which he did: “To Harold de Polo—My friend of ‘those days’ and these—‘The Donkeyman—I done my share o’ drinkin’ in my time. (Regretfully) Then was good times, those days! Can’t hold up under drink no more. Doctor told me I’d got to stop or die. (He spits contentedly) So I stops!’ Gene—The Moon of the Caribbees.”²⁵³

Strange Interlude had proved “damn difficult” to get through in spite of O’Neill’s abstinence. During the first few weeks, all he could do was revise the second scene over and over; after a while, however, he admitted that although it was “coming forth more slowly than usual,” he was confident it was progressing well.²⁵⁴ By August he’d completed five acts, but again felt “sour … on life generally.” Then the Triumvirate decided to call it quits, and he needed a producer. “Seriously, I honestly am getting awfully fed up with the eternal show-shop from which nothing ever seems to emerge except more show-shop,” he complained to George Jean Nathan over the trouble of drumming up a financial backer. David Belasco had, for a time, optioned Marco Millions and promised the whopping sum of $200,000 for its production costs (including a research trip for Bobby Jones to study Chinese set designs firsthand); but he eventually passed on the play, as did Arthur Hopkins and several other producers after him. Macgowan proposed that they join forces with the Actors’ Theater company to offset Marco’s expenses, but O’Neill argued that signing with such a “show-shop” outfit would be demeaning after what they’d accomplished: “It cheapens us both and it cheapens the plays in the minds of cheap people.” “It’s a most humiliating game for an artist,” he said. “Novelists have the best of it.”255

On October 13, 1926, while Boulton stayed behind in Maine to decamp from Loon Lodge, O’Neill took an overnight train back to New York—and back to the beautiful Carlotta Monterey.

The Soliloquy Is Dead! Long Live—What?

To celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday, O’Neill was invited as an honored guest to the Yale-Dartmouth football game, which he attended with George Pierce Baker and Kenneth Macgowan. In New York, he dropped in on Paul Robeson backstage at the Comedy Theatre, where Robeson was starring in Black Boy, a play based loosely on Jack Johnson that closed after only three weeks. Robeson admitted to O’Neill that he was as fed up with acting in dramas as O’Neill had been with writing them and decided to exclusively pursue a career as a singer. O’Neill also met with prospective producers for Marco Millions and Lazarus Laughed, conducted several sessions with Dr. Hamilton, and attended rehearsals for the Triumvirate’s final production as a team—a revival of Beyond the Horizon, in conjunction with the Actors’ Theater, on November 20. Boulton arrived for a ten-day “honeymoon,” but then left him to his devices.²⁵⁶ Most of his energy after his wife’s departure was spent wooing and decisively falling in love with Monterey.

“He came up on three afternoons,” she recalled. “I hardly knew the man … and he paid no more attention to me than if I were that chair, and he began to talk about his early life—that he had no real home, that he had no mother in the real sense, no father in the real sense, no one to treat him as a child should be treated … those three afternoons I sat and listened to this man—at first I was a little worried, and then I was deeply unhappy.”²⁵⁷ It’s true that O’Neill and Monterey had met on only six occasions at Belgrade Lakes.²⁵⁸ What isn’t entirely true is that she “hardly knew the man” when they reunited in New York, as several pictures of them in Maine make clear. Indeed, O’Neill’s work diary indicates that rather than “three afternoons” at her apartment, as the ever-decorous Monterey wished posterity to believe, they met every chance they had through late October and November. They shared meals together, went shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch and Macy’s, attended the Philharmonic, and even, on November 22, had their portraits taken by the celebrated photographer Nickolas Muray. During his last five days in New York, they were inseparable. O’Neill was with her at her flat at 20 East Sixty-Seventh Street until two thirty on the morning he sailed back to Bermuda.259

Boulton had traveled with the children to Connecticut from Belgrade Lakes to look in on Brook Farm and visit her family. From there, she departed for Bermuda, only crossing her husband’s path once during a few days’ visit from him at Brook Farm, which they’d put up for sale to cover the cost of buying and renovating Spithead. Again O’Neill felt abandoned, and he soon blamed Boulton’s disregard for his relationship with Monterey: “It was partly your never sending me any word,” he wrote to her that spring after having confessed, and bitterly argued over, his love affair. “When you went to Bermuda and left me alone in New York that helped me to forget myself.”²⁶⁰

Back in Bermuda, Boulton rented a small house near Spithead called Belmere, which the family inhabited for the entire winter because of endless snags with Spithead’s renovations. Boulton wanted a new kitchen and O’Neill wanted a tennis court; the enormous water tank in the side yard, constructed by the privateer to hold seven thousand gallons of water to supply his ships, required an electric pump for indoor plumbing. A section of the stone wharf had been pulverized by a devastating hurricane that summer with winds up to 114 miles per hour and now also needed repair. Boulton hadn’t expected the work to be completed by the time she arrived, but she’d expected that something would have been done. The colossal project was overseen by Frederick Hill, the architect of James and Ella O’Neill’s longtime residence, the Prince George Hotel in New York. That October Boulton had written O’Neill from Loon Lodge complaining that Hill was too cryptic in his responses to her: “Another futile letter from Hill—too stupid. No info. at all. He is an ass.” After such insults were trained at him personally, Frederick Hill offered to resign from the job but, lacking an alternative, they kept him on.²⁶¹

O’Neill arrived in Bermuda in late November, thinking of little but Monterey. He wrote her long, passionate letters pledging his devotion, but not to her alone. “As soon as I reached here I told Agnes exactly how I felt about leaving you,” he told her. “I said I loved you. I also said, and with equal truth, that I loved her. Does this sound idiotic to you? I hope not! I hope you will understand. … It is possible to love like that.” (Carlotta, at this point ambivalent about their future, pleaded with O’Neill to destroy their letters, insisting that anyone who saved their mail “ought to be shot,” yet she judiciously saved his to her.)262

In December 1926, O’Neill dedicated himself to preparing Marco Millions for his publisher Horace Liveright and readying Lazarus Laughed for the stage, “cutting loose ends, concentrating, clarifying.”²⁶³ (Lazarus required a cast of 120 and would cost $50,000 or more; Macgowan warned that such an undertaking “doesn’t slip onto the American stage very quickly or easily.”)²⁶⁴ O’Neill celebrated his one-year anniversary of sobriety, December 31, by sending off Marco and arranging for the anarchist Alexander Berkman, then in exile in Russia, to translate Lazarus for a Moscow production. He could finally resume work on Strange Interlude, “in which,” he told Berkman, “I attempt to do in a play all that can be done in a novel.”²⁶⁵

O’Neill labored over the sprawling nine-act script through the winter, completing a first draft in early March. Including the three months at Loon Lodge, the play had taken no fewer than three hundred creative workdays to complete. “It does all I hoped it would do, I think,” he told George Jean Nathan, “and seems to me a successful adventure along a new technique that offers limitless new possibilities.” Jimmy Light again visited Bermuda that summer, but this time O’Neill explained the play to his discerning friend. In Light’s concluding paragraph of “The Parade of Masks,” he writes, “O’Neill neither gave up writing plays nor did he write a novel. He did, however, write ‘Strange Interlude.’ In this play, he again used the mask but this time not the physical mask. In this play he used the novelist’s prerogative of inner revelation. The means by which he accomplished both artistic ends was the soliloquy used forthrightly and continuously as no other playwright before him has dared to use it. By the insight furnished by the soliloquies we as audience, can project the emotions, the true not the apparent ones onto the face of the characters as he presents a facade to the rest of the world. It is the mask returned, making possible two levels of dramatic action.”266

Just after finishing Strange Interlude, O’Neill roughly sketched out an autobiographical series with the working title “The Sea-Mother’s Son,” an idea he would return to years later. The autograph manuscript of this work was discovered among Boulton’s papers after her death in 1968, and it was most likely written on March 8, 1927.²⁶⁷ The working title became “The Sea Mother’s Son: The Story of the Birth of a Soul.”²⁶⁸ Again his idea was to blur the genre lines between the novel and the play: as he wrote George Jean Nathan the following year, “This [Grand Opus] is to be neither play nor novel although there will be many plays in it and it will have greater scope than any novel I know of. Its form will be altogether its own and my own.”²⁶⁹

His original notes from 1927 read, in part: “M—Lonely life—spoiled before marriage (husband friend of father’s—father his great admirer—drinking companions)—fashionable convent girl—religious & naive—talent for music—physical beauty—ostracism after marriage due to husband’s profession—lonely life after marriage—no contact with husband’s friends—husband man’s man—heavy drinker—out with men until small hours every night—slept late—little time with her—stingy about money due to his childhood experience with grinding poverty after his father deserted family to return to Ireland to spend last days.”²⁷⁰ By 1935, he returned to the idea and envisioned nine plays, “a notion I had years ago for a combination autobiographical novel in play form for publication in book, not production on stage.”²⁷¹

By 1939, he’d boil these ideas down to a single tragedy to take place over a single day: Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

O’Neill’s infatuation with Monterey slowly began to diminish after months of steady work. He continued writing her, but the letters, as in the past when he’d separated from Boulton, became more matter-of-fact and emotionally distant in tone, and Monterey decided to head to a spa in Baden-Baden, Germany, that June, in part to stamp out (or put to the test) their lingering desire for one another. When Boulton left the island in mid-April to visit her dying father at Shelton, O’Neill’s letter to her betrays a guilt-ridden and desperately needy conscience. After dropping her off at the ship, “I drove right back to Our Home. Our Home!” he said. “The thought of the place is indissolubly intermingled with my love for you, with our nine years of marriage that, after much struggle, have finally won to this haven, this ultimate island where we may rest and live toward our dreams with a sense of permanence and security that here we do belong. ‘And, perhaps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs.’” Boulton wasn’t over his affair, he knew. “I was never in love with her. That was nonsense. … I love you and only you, now and forever.”272

Shane, Agnes, Oona, and Eugene O’Neill in Bermuda, 1926.

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

Lawrence Langner, the managing director of the Theatre Guild, paid a visit to O’Neill at Spithead that March. Aside from Langner, O’Neill never liked the Guild’s board of directors; they were an infamous assortment of difficult personalities but by then the most respected producers of serious drama in the country, having produced such breakout American plays as Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine in 1923, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted in 1924, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and S. N. Behrman’s The Second Man in 1927.

The acrimony between O’Neill and the Guild had a long history. From the time O’Neill had first submitted Thirst to the Washington Square Players in 1915, before they’d become the Theatre Guild, to the end of the Provincetown Players in 1922, O’Neill and the Guild’s executive committee simply didn’t see eye to eye: “In rejecting my work you have a clear lead [in numbers] over any other management,” he wrote Langner in 1922. “All this without any trace of hard feelings on my part,” he said. “It is merely a question of unprejudiced disagreement, but I am afraid the evidence indicates that your Com. [committee] & I are doomed forever to disagree.”273 Of course, the one play of O’Neill’s the Guild had produced, as the Washington Square Players, was In the Zone, which he thought of as a lesser work.

The Guild had rejected “Anna Christie” in 1921, but Langner pleaded with the committee to reconsider its approach to the playwright. O’Neill had outlined what he believed to be a series of slights against him by the Guild and its management to Langner, who forwarded the letter to his fellow producer Theresa Helburn with a note to be read out loud to the committee: “The trouble with you people is that you don’t understand O’Neill’s temperament. O’Neill is perfectly easy to get along with if you treat him as a friend. If your relations are impersonal, you’ll get nowhere. (Why [don’t we] get up a booze party for him?)”274 By the spring of 1927, O’Neill was willing to swallow his pride and accept the Guild’s (to his mind paltry) option because “it is all going out and nothing coming in with me at present and I direly need all the cash I can grab.” But the Guild must reciprocate his own “eagerness” by committing themselves to an “actual production at the earliest possible date.”²⁷⁵ He was especially concerned that the method of Strange Interlude would be leaked and that someone else might steal the idea and produce a play before his appeared.

Langner read Marco Millions during his stay in Bermuda, and it intrigued him; but Strange Interlude was a revelation. He read the script in one night in his hotel room. A tropical storm had descended on the island, and as the storm grew louder and more menacing, the action of the play grew correspondingly more thrilling. He read until four o’clock in the morning, and by the time he’d reached the sixth act, he said, “I judged it one of the greatest plays of all time.”²⁷⁶ The next day O’Neill celebrated Langner’s eulogies over Strange Interlude with a swim, while Langner filmed him with his cine-Kodak movie camera. “He was built like an athlete,” Langner said, “his deep black eyes set in a sunburnt Irish face, as handsome as one could hope to see anywhere, and the skin of his lean body was the color and texture of mahogany with underlying muscles of whipcord. At no time before or since have I seen him in such good health.”²⁷⁷ (When Langner later informed George Bernard Shaw that O’Neill was done with alcohol, the Irish playwright wryly responded, “He’ll probably never write a good play again.”)²⁷⁸

O’Neill already had made it clear to Langner before he’d arrived that for the Guild to option his plays would require a binding agreement to produce both Marco and Strange Interlude for its next season. Langner agreed and convinced him to return to New York to strategize for the ambitious productions.

On May 15, less than three weeks after Boulton’s return from Connecticut, O’Neill sailed back to New York with Harold de Polo, who’d rented a house near Spithead, and stayed at Lawrence Langner’s apartment in New York. On six out of the eight nights he was there, Langner remembered, O’Neill left his apartment for Monterey’s. “He told me he had fallen in love with her,” Langner recounted of O’Neill’s stay. “He said one reason he got on so well with her was that she was such a good manager; she was able to organize the material side of his life—arranging for railroad tickets, and so forth. Agnes, he said, could seldom plan ahead; she was easygoing and helpless, and needed to be looked after by him.”279

By the time O’Neill returned to Spithead, the property no longer appeared as the “haven” he’d envisioned when Boulton was absent. “Perhaps it is my mood,” he wrote Monterey, “but the weather has seemed intolerably oppressive and I’ve found little zest in anything I used to take pleasure in. Even the sea has failed me. It is such a tepid, lukewarm ocean now, there is no life or sting to it, the only reaction one gets is lassitude. I would never spend another summer down here on a bet. It really is just too boring! … My visit to New York in May was far too short!” He and Boulton had a summer of “nervous bickerings and misunderstandings,” during which time he’d been either sick with the Bermuda flu or working zealously on cutting the action of Strange Interlude to one night, down from the multiple nights its cumbersome original length would require.²⁸⁰

O’Neill traveled back to New York late that August to convince the Theatre Guild to stop delaying, with its convoluted options and paltry advances, and produce Marco Millions and Strange Interlude that season. Boulton also believed that, given the breakdown of their relationship that summer, it would be good for him to be away from the family. This solo trip to New York amounted to a trial separation.

Once aboard the Fort St. George, O’Neill wired Agnes Boulton with a bawdy reference to their last night together. But he longed to see Carlotta Monterey, who’d just returned from a restorative couple of months luxuriating in Baden-Baden. On September 9, they reunited for the first time since May, at which point he reported back to Boulton that he was bored and lonely (“the alcoholic days were much pleasanter!”); he was spending time with Monterey, he told her, but their relationship was platonic.²⁸¹ He would remain in New York until mid-October.

During this separation, the correspondence between O’Neill and Boulton oscillated between mutual pledges of freedom from their conjugal vows and strident accusations of betrayal. “Please do anything you want to do,” Boulton wrote, “anything that will make you happy, or give you pleasure.” Then, a few days later, “Goodbye. I’m glad Carlotta’s nerves are gone. Do you think she would be interested in taking charge of Spithead? If so, tell her I’ve given up the job. She is certainly more beautiful than I am.” “What sort of game is this you’re playing, Agnes?” he demanded, after accusing her of having an affair. “Either I’m crazy or you are! Probably I am, anyway. Or, at any rate, I wish to Christ I could escape from this obscene and snaily creeping tedium of dull days, and empty hours like nervous yawns, into some madness—of love or lust or drink or anything else!”282

“Oh, you’ve gone and done it!” Monterey moaned helplessly to O’Neill before he departed once more for Bermuda. “I love you, damn it!”²⁸³

O’Neill arrived at Spithead on October 21, his marriage of over nine years effectively, and mutually, sabotaged. O’Neill had arranged for Macgowan to keep Monterey showered in roses and addressed his love letters to “Shadow Eyes,” his pet name for her. When he returned to New York in mid-November, his letters to Boulton became either guardedly accusatory or all business. Planning for his second divorce, he knew that any correspondence could be used against him in court. He requested that Boulton send him every item of manuscript material that was stored at Spithead, giving the only partially true justification that he planned to sell it to a rare books dealer to avoid financial catastrophe. At Christmastime, after she’d sent him the majority of the material (minus his 1925 diary, his autograph manuscript outlining “The Sea Mother’s Son,” and Exorcism, among other valuable items), he broke up with her permanently. “You don’t love me any more,” he wrote. “We don’t love each other. … I love someone else. Most deeply. … And the someone loves me.”²⁸⁴

Carlotta Monterey. An inscription by Monterey reads, “This was Gene’s favorite photograph of me.”

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

The Theatre Guild at long last scheduled Marco Millions and Strange Interlude to open in January 1928, but most of his attention was focused on extracting himself from his marriage and attaching himself more firmly to the future Mrs. Eugene O’Neill. Boulton, however, ignored O’Neill’s entreaties for her to keep away until after the dual openings. Leaving the children behind, she sailed to New York and checked into a room at the Hotel Wentworth, where O’Neill was staying.285 Monterey wasn’t amused. “She calls me every day to get that bitch out of the room,” O’Neill complained to Harold de Polo.²⁸⁶

On January 14, Boulton ordered a sunlamp in her hotel room to battle a cold before heading back to Bermuda. Sprawling naked and miserable under the heat, she heard a knock. Thinking it was her sister, she opened the door en dishabille, and there was O’Neill. They fell into each other’s arms. It was, Boulton later recalled of the spontaneous tryst, “like two ghosts sleeping together.”²⁸⁷ This was the last night they made love and, unless by accident before her return to Bermuda, the last time they would encounter one another for more than a decade.

Then came an unexpected triumph. After several years of fiendishly annoying rewrites, compromises, and disappointments, Marco Millions premiered on January 9 at the Guild Theatre and was a box office hit. O’Neill’s only accomplished satire, Marco tracks the legendary journey of the thirteenth-century Venetian trader Marco Polo. Determined to return home a millionaire, Marco cavalierly spreads materialism across the Far and Middle East. The script demands terrifically complex scene changes and a gigantic cast—thirty-one speaking roles as well as “People of Persia, India, Mongolia, Cathay, courtiers, nobles, ladies, wives, warriors of Kublai Kahn’s court, musicians, dancers, Chorus of mourners” (CP2, 382). Casting this show wasn’t easy, even for the nonspeaking roles. Nearly every scene includes music, poetry, dancing, and chanting, and the dialogue must come across as satiric one minute and transcendent the next.

O’Neill always bore an abiding fascination with the Far East. “Europe somehow means nothing to me,” he said to Boulton when she’d expressed her longing to transplant to Europe. “Either the South Seas or China, say I.” He read Kate Buss’s Studies in the Chinese Drama (1922), which informed his medley of styles; for plot and characterization, he consulted Marco Polo’s Il milione, or “The Million,” the first narrative of Marco’s expedition in 1271–95. This alleged travelogue, actually written by a romance writer named Rusticello da Pisa, remained the only source for the West’s imaginings of the Far East until the seventeenth century, and most of it was based on lies. (Polo’s reports of dog-faced natives, unicorns, and parakeets lifting elephants to the sky are a few indications that the Venetian’s account was to a great extent bogus.) O’Neill’s notes from the scholarly edition of The Book of Ser Marco Polo reveal that O’Neill quoted the editor’s description of Marco Polo verbatim—“a practical man, brave, shrewd, prudent, keen in affairs, and never losing interest in mercantile details, very fond of the chase, sparing of speech,” after which he scrawled, “The American Ideal!” His own dialogue made him “guffaw as I write … and not bitter humor either although it’s all satirical. I actually grow to love my American pillars of society, Polo Brothers & Son.” Yet he still wanted the nation to acknowledge “the true valuation of all our triumphant brass band materialism; [the country] should see the cost—and the result in terms of eternal verities. What a colossal, ironic, one hundred percent American tragedy that would be—what?”288

O’Neill’s comical anachronism (the Venetians in the play speak in 1920s American slang) was a frontal assault on the excesses of American cultural imperialism. Allusions to contemporary American society in the stage directions are pronounced. He likens Marco’s comportment to that of a southern senator who wants a constitutional amendment, referring to Texas’s notorious anti-immigration stance and denial of the theory of evolution, to prohibit “the migration of non-Nordic birds into Texas, or … the practice of the laws of biology within the twelve-mile limit” (CP2, 424). When Marco’s uncle mulls over their prospects in the Middle East, he reads the notes from a previous voyage: “There’s one kingdom called Mosul [now the second-largest city in Iraq] and in it a district of Baku where there’s a great fountain of oil. There’s a growing demand for it. (then speaking) Make a mental note of that” (CP2, 401).

O’Neill was plainly at risk here of betraying his own doctrine that propaganda doesn’t “strike home.” The critics split both ways: liberals, the choir to whom O’Neill preached, applauded Marco Millions for “poking fun at American philistinism, American money-grubbing and money-wallowing,” while conservatives denounced it as scurrilous opinionating. Many parallels were made between O’Neill’s play and Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, a popular satire of the spiritual bankruptcy both authors believed American capitalism had spawned. (Babbitt was published in 1922, the year O’Neill began Marco.) George Jean Nathan referred to his friend’s play as “the sourest and most magnificent poke in the jaw that American big business and the American business man have ever got.” The Wall Street News review, on the other hand, was O’Neill’s worst fear of propaganda realized: “By many sterile devices, O’Neill drives home his sledgehammer points until the play takes on some of the dull witlessness of the Babbittish business man he is so intent on impaling.”289 But for all of Marco Millions’ notoriety, it would be overshadowed by O’Neill’s next production, Strange Interlude, three weeks later.

On January 30, O’Neill avoided the premiere of what he knew would be either his greatest theatrical sensation or, given its unconventional themes and stage techniques, merely an ambitious failure. He strolled aimlessly around the city for the first couple of hours of the play’s opening and bumped into an old crony from his seafaring days. “Gene O’Neill!” he heard the aged sailor call out on the street. “What the hell are you doing these days?” (“At that very minute,” mused a publisher O’Neill told this to years later, “his greatest hit was being played on Broadway!”)²⁹⁰ After this brief encounter, O’Neill went back to the Wentworth to meet Kenneth Macgowan and his wife, Edna, who were attending the play, for dinner during intermission. The curtain rose at five fifteen instead of eight thirty, New York’s usual curtain time. After a ninety-minute dinner break at seven forty, they were to reconvene at nine o’clock, with a final curtain at eleven.²⁹¹ Macgowan informed his apprehensive friend that the publicity was so hyped up around the theater district, a Broadway drugstore was selling “Strange Interlude” sandwiches to the theatergoers. “I know what that is,” O’Neill replied. “It’s a four-decker with nothing but ham!”292

Strange Interlude premiered at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre and was largely hailed as O’Neill’s first true tour de force; with its groundbreaking “thought asides” and timely themes, the play signaled its author’s complete maturation as an artist.

O’Neill’s self-described “woman play,” Strange Interlude revolves around the convoluted relationships of Nina Leeds, one of his most deeply wrought female characters. Nina has built a myth of perfection around her deceased fiancé, Gordon Shaw, a World War I aviator shot down two days before the armistice. She surrounds herself with four men who individually cannot satisfy her needs but together comprise her ideal man—lover, provider, father, and son. (The father figure, Charlie Marsden, the combined names of O’Neill friends Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley, is the only demonstrably bisexual character in his canon.)²⁹³ Along with meeting Nina’s essential desires, they also represent the forces shaping the nation: her dead fiancé American “schoolboy ideals,” her lover scientific advancement, her provider venture capitalism, her father figure Puritan morality, and her son Gordon a false sense of national innocence. Since none of these are compatible, the nation (Nina) defaults to the protective and stable, if morally restraining, realm of the puritanical.²⁹⁴

Strange Interlude, O’Neill said, was an “attempt at the new masked psychological drama … without masks—a successful attempt, perhaps, in so far as it concerns only surfaces and their immediate subsurfaces, but not where, occasionally, it tries to probe deeper.”²⁹⁵ Writing from inside O’Neill’s head, George Jean Nathan, in his arch 1929 sketch “Eugene O’Neill as a Character in Fiction,” sets down a prolonged, playfully satiric dialogue in O’Neill’s voice that must have, at least partially, originated in a conversation: “The truth about soliloquies and asides as I employ them is that, while they are cunningly announced by me to represent my characters’ unspoken thoughts—I’m a shrewd hand at concealing the obvious and artfully masking it in a way to make the impressionables gabble—they are actually nothing more than straight dramatic speeches.”²⁹⁶

In this way, O’Neill’s method united Elizabethan soliloquy with twentieth-century psychology: the alternatively called “spoken thoughts, inner monologues, thought asides, double dialogue, poetry of the unconscious, Freudian chorus, and silences out loud,”297 the asides embedded in the dialogue recall the psychological theories and “stream of consciousness” concepts found in William James, Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. Yet O’Neill wrote one of the play’s reviewers that “these same ideas are age-old to the artist and … any artist who was a good psychologist and had had a varied and sensitive experience with life and all sorts of people could have written S[trange]. I[nterlude]. without ever having heard of Freud, Jung, Adler & Co.”²⁹⁸

That the characters’ thoughts are conscious, rather than windows into their subconscious, amplifies the dramatic irony, the point at which the audience knows what some characters do not. And while tension builds on the stage, the audience members become more and more aware that their own lives, even in their most intimate relationships, are all too often based on the very same types of falsehoods. Everyday speech takes up less than a third of the script; the remainder consists of inner monologues masked by the superficiality of public speech, and the stage directions are so intricate that the script reads, intentionally, more like a novel than a play. (During rehearsal O’Neill groused to Lawrence Langner that “if the actors weren’t so dumb, they wouldn’t need asides; they’d be able to express the meaning without them.”)²⁹⁹ These thought asides presented a daunting challenge for the director, Philip Moeller, however: just how, precisely, were actors supposed to represent conscious thought without the audience confusing their asides with actual speech? Spotlighting? Voice-overs? Then one day while Moeller was on a train, the conductor pulled the emergency brake. Moeller instinctively clenched, and he looked around to see the other passengers had frozen up too. He’d stumbled on his solution: when an actor delivered an inner monologue, the others must freeze in “arrested motion” or “physical quiet.”³⁰⁰

The critics, once again, put up their gloves. The majority considered Strange Interlude “the most significant contribution any American has made to the stage” and “a monument in the history of American dramaturgy.” Nearly everyone understood that it was a novel for the stage; and most agreed didn’t all agree with New York World critic Dudley Nichols’s assessment of the result: “It would seem that he has not only written a great American play but the great American novel as well. This is a psychological novel of tremendous power and depth put into the theatre instead of between the covers of a book. It is a great novel without any of the novelist’s padding.”301

Naysayers were still legion, and the disputes often turned personal. When St. John Ervine accused O’Neill’s asides of being “either an attempt to prevent actors from acting or a sign of laziness in the author,” George Jean Nathan shot back, “With all due respect to friend Ervine, I have the honor to believe that on this occasion he has pulled what may politely be described as a boner.” While one critic asserted that “nine acts of psychopathic fury may weary, but when Mr. O’Neill is the black magician they do not bore,” another fumed, “There were nine acts and one intermission of one hour, during which we craved for chloroform, but got only—soup. Some of those present wore evening dress in the afternoon and others wore afternoon dress in the evening, and neither mattered. The only thing that did matter was the excessive and glutinous boredom of the thing and its bombastic pretence.” Heywood Broun scoffed that the play’s angel Otto Kahn, the Wall Street millionaire and early backer of the Provincetown Players (whom O’Neill jokingly referred to as “Otto the Magnificent, the Great Kahn”), was a “sucker” for financing it.³⁰²

Theater professionals often think it best to ignore reviews of their plays, good or bad, when the show is still in production. Not O’Neill. He pored over his notices with a vigilance that bordered on the pathological, then collected them in enormous scrapbooks.³⁰³ Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune reported this fact in what he described as a casual conversation with O’Neill after Strange Interlude premiered: “Among the notable things about Eugene O’Neill is the fact that he is one playwright who does not pretend that he never sees the notices of his plays. He reads them and is interested in them and, heaven knows, he has his likes and dislikes among the local critics. It is only fair to everybody to add that these judgments of his are not necessarily based on the degree of enthusiasm expressed for his works, even though he would object to being used as a sort of injured Belgium in a war between rival viewers.”304

World War I, in fact, was a fitting metaphor for the rousing war of words fought in the press over Strange Interlude, and the critics ran afoul of one another as Germany had with the Allies over Belgium. In Europe alliances and counter-alliances redrew the map the way O’Neill redrew the map of American theater. (The appearance of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, might be regarded as the Treaty of Versailles, simultaneously ending and renewing the age-old battles over O’Neill’s legacy.) “I’m getting awfully callous to the braying, for and against,” O’Neill wrote a few years later to Nathan. “When they knock me, what the devil!, they’re really boosting me with their wholesale condemnations, for the reaction against such nonsense will come soon enough. These tea-pot turmoils at least keep me shaken up and convinced I’m on my way to something.”³⁰⁵

By this time, 1928, O’Neill had divided his critics into three classes: “Play Reporters,” “Professional Funny Men,” and “the men with proper background or real knowledge of the theater of all time to entitle them to be critics”: “The play reporters just happen to be people who have the job of reporting what happens during the evening, the story of the play and who played the parts. I have always found that these people reported the stories of my plays fairly accurately. The Professional Funny Men are beneath contempt. What they say is only of importance to their own strutting vanities. From the real critics I have always had the feeling that they saw what I was trying to do and whether they praised or blamed, they caught the point.”³⁰⁶

O’Neill made it a habit to contact “real critics” after encountering what he considered a particularly keen insight into his plays. Joseph Wood Krutch, for instance, placed O’Neill’s melding of the novel and the drama within the broader context of history: “The drama has always seemed the form of expression best suited to an heroic age and the novel the form best suited to a complex and baffled one, since a certain simplicity of presentation has been inseparable from playwriting. … The stage has seemed destined to remain, perforce, content with simple outlines. It has been, in short, a place where only major chords could be struck even though existing in an age which had lost the power to be moved by any but the subtlest and most difficult harmonies.”307 O’Neill wrote Krutch that his remarks had been “deeply gratifying” to him, “especially that you found that there was something of a novel’s comprehensiveness in [Strange Interlude]. What you say about slightness of even the best modern plays is exactly the way I feel. To me they are all totally lacking in all true power and imagination.”³⁰⁸ But by then he’d relinquished his vow to quit the drama for the novel. “No,” he told Krutch, “I think the novelists are worse than the playwrights—they waste more of one’s time!”³⁰⁹

The play’s inclusion of sexual promiscuity, infidelity, contraception, prostitution, abortion, atheism, near polyandry, and incest provided a bounty of red meat for censors as well as the critics. Manhattan’s ever-faithful attorney general Joab Banton got back in the game; but he found the Theatre Guild far more accommodating than the Triumvirate had been when it came to such bowdlerizing as replacing the word “abortion” with “operation,” which they did.³¹⁰

Mayor Malcolm Nichols of Boston banned a long-planned production in his city, labeling the script a “disgusting spectacle of immorality and advocacy of atheism, of domestic infidelity and the destruction of unborn human life.” To allow the play to be produced in Boston, Langner and Helburn again revised the play, this time without O’Neill’s knowledge and far more drastically. “The deletion of a few pages from a great play cannot destroy the whole,” Langner told the Boston Post. “The play does not depend upon mere words for its effect,” Helburn added, “and we can easily cut out every one of the words that the Mayor wishes deleted.” Publicly, Nichols stood firm that regardless of any deletions or revisions “the play in any version glorifies an indefensible standard of conduct and an abject code of morals.” (Langner later accused the mayor of rejecting it because he’d failed to shake them down for $10,000.)³¹¹

Mayor Thomas McGrath of Quincy, a Boston suburb, volunteered his city as an alternative. (Near the theater was a local restaurant owned by one Howard Deering Johnson, as yet unknown among Boston’s elite, who sold enough meals to begin expanding his business into the nation’s largest hotel and restaurant chain, Howard Johnson’s.) When McGrath entered the theater on opening night, September 30, 1929, he was greeted with a grateful ovation from the “ninety-nine and some tenths percent pure Bostonian” audience.312 After the five-and-a-half-hour performance (with a break for dinner at Howard Johnson’s), the cast received fourteen curtain calls. Mayor McGrath was then bombarded for his opinion of the play. Though a citizens’ jury had also attended that night, its judgment was irrelevant. McGrath proclaimed that what he’d learned watching Strange Interlude was “worth a hundred sermons.”³¹³

Langner and Helburn left in many of the cuts they’d made for Boston, nevertheless, and made further cuts for Philadelphia and elsewhere.³¹⁴ Providence still banned the play that April 1930 under its “Chastity and Morality” law, a prohibition on theatricals that a committee of locals believed might corrupt the city’s youth.³¹⁵

Overall, the “ayes” had won it for Strange Interlude from the start. Performances of its first run sold out so quickly that for months, in an unventilated theater of about nine hundred seats in record-breaking heat, theatergoers chose to stand in back rather than miss out on what had been billed as the must-see cultural event of the season. O’Neill had suspected that Strange Interlude would be his “big bacon-bringer,” but he never anticipated this. “That trends on fanaticism it seems to me,” he mused that April after hearing there were still standees at the performances. “Myself, I wouldn’t stand up 4 1/2 hours to see the original production of the Crucifixion!”³¹⁶

Strange Interlude’s Broadway run alone lasted seventeen months and 432 performances, then more in the multiple touring productions that followed, and the book version topped the best-seller list. The play also enjoyed two successful national tours, and, in 1932, was made into an MGM film starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer. O’Neill’s pioneering play-as-novel ultimately made him $250,000 richer and won him his third Pulitzer Prize (the prize money was promptly donated to the Authors’ League Fund).317 After this, O’Neill was no longer spoken of as merely “America’s greatest playwright,” a rather unimpressive title at the time, but now as one of the world’s greatest living writers; over the following year, the Nobel Prize committee on literature, eager to place an American on its roster by the late 1920s, added him to their short list.

On February 7, O’Neill wrote Boulton to say good-bye. He admitted that the triumph of Strange Interlude had passed him by just as the arrival of his mother’s casket from California had deprived him of reveling in the success of The Hairy Ape: “The trouble with my triumphs is that there’s always so much of my own living on my mind at the time I haven’t got any interest left for plays,” he wrote. “‘So ist das Leben,’ I guess. Or at least my ‘leben.’ The power & the glory always pass over—or under—my head.” He was resolute that they “must not see each other again for a long time,” but ended on a conciliatory note: “All my loving friendship to you always!”³¹⁸

Boulton had already written him from Bermuda a few days before receiving this. “I am very much in the dark,” she said. “I received a cable from the N.Y. Times saying you had just left for Europe. … I know nothing.”³¹⁹ Sure enough, without notifying anyone but a solemnly sworn few, and leaving no trace of their destination behind for Boulton, his children, or the press, O’Neill and Monterey had clandestinely sailed for Europe. Their flight to avoid the combustible reactions of his wife’s acrimony and that of the scandal-mongering press would last for more than three years.