The Irish Luck Kid, 1916
In the rash lustihead of my young powers
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
—FRANCIS THOMPSON, The Hound of Heaven, 1893
If tragedies might any Prologue have,
All those he made, would scarce make one to this.
—HUGH HOLLAND, ELEGIAC SONNET TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1623
Spring 1916, New York City
EUGENE O’NEILL, a despondent twenty-seven-year-old college dropout and ex-sailor, had spent the last six months lost in a whiskey fog of oblivion at a Greenwich Village saloon known as the Golden Swan Café. To the regulars, it was “the Hell Hole,” so named after a passerby glanced inside one day and cringed, “This is one helluva hole.” O’Neill felt right at home.1
The Hell Hole sat on the southeastern corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, the heart of Greenwich Village, and it served hustlers, pickpockets, prostitutes, bohemians, and the Hudson Dusters, a cocaine-fueled Irish gang that had lorded over the neighborhood for years. If you had a hangover, and nearly everyone did, the Sixth Avenue El that passed just outside the front door rattled the three-story brick building with a head-splitting drum roll. The bar’s proprietor, Tom Wallace, hung two massive shillelaghs crossed in the pagan way behind the bar below a photograph of Tammany Hall’s Irish-born strongman, Richard “Boss” Croker.2 Beer was 5¢ a glass in the back room, where O’Neill would retreat to get drunk in relative solitude in the bar’s dark corners, undisturbed by the quivering glow of two gas jets mounted on the wall. Patrons rapped on the door three times, and a bouncer named Leftie Louie glared through a slat before deciding whether to let them in. Women weren’t permitted to smoke in most places in Manhattan, but at the Hell Hole, they were encouraged to light up.3
Just the year before, O’Neill had given himself the nickname “The Irish Luck Kid,” but by now the irony of that roguish moniker had become all too clear. His life to date had been a relentless cascade of hopeless hopes: he was thrown out of Princeton freshman year for poor academic standing and drunkenness; he got married, divorced, and in the process fathered a son whom he still hadn’t seen since infancy; he fled the conjugal life for the teeming jungles of Honduras to prospect for gold and instead contracted a crippling bout of malaria; he survived nine months as a beachcomber in Buenos Aires, working odd jobs, eating scraps, and swilling gin and cheap beer; he contracted tuberculosis, a minor case, yet one that landed him five months at a sanatorium; he studied playwriting at Harvard University, but the “Old Man,” as O’Neill called his father, stopped paying the tuition after two semesters. True, he’d published a book, Thirst and Other One-Act Plays, but his father fronted the production costs, and it hadn’t made a dime in royalties. Most painfully, for the moment, he’d just published a poem dedicated to his girlfriend Beatrice Ashe in which he compared her to Dante’s Beatrice. She was in New London, Connecticut, where they had both grown up, and O’Neill was convinced that she was ready to dump him. (He was right.)
O’Neill was antisocial, alcoholic, a heavy smoker. His father was a domineering overachiever and his brother an underachiever and a world-class drunk. His mother, Ella, had been a morphine addict since the day he was born, all eleven pounds of him.
He’d tried to commit suicide; he’d tried to keep writing. He’d failed at both.
O’Neill shared a room with a sixty-one-year-old anarchist named Terry Carlin in an unfurnished apartment down Fourth Street from the Hell Hole so filthy they called it “the Garbage Flat.” Everyone in the Village knew Carlin, an unapologetic drinker who held court in the Hell Hole’s backroom and shamelessly sponged off O’Neill, who at the time was living on a small allowance from his father, for as long as he was able. (Carlin was able, it turned out, for nearly two decades.) Born Terence O’Carolan in 1855, Terry Carlin was raised in Chicago but had emigrated as a young boy from Ireland; and he looked the part of the rogue Irishman, with his unkempt shock of silvery hair tucked behind the ears, baggy gray suits, and fedora-style hat tilted back on his head as if he were a leprechaun. He spoke rapidly, at an unnervingly high pitch, and was endowed with preternatural wit; he had the hands of a laborer but long ago had vowed never to work for money. There’s a word for what Carlin thought of puritanical drudges who boasted, as O’Neill’s father did, that they never missed a day of work in their lives: suckers.
Few at the Hell Hole took Terry Carlin seriously. But to O’Neill, he was nothing less than brilliant and among the best-read men he’d ever met. Like O’Neill, he was a self-styled “philosophical anarchist,” someone who believed in nonviolently protesting against all forms of institutional power, mostly by ignoring them. (“I am a philosophical anarchist,” O’Neill maintained as late as 1946, “which means, ‘Go to it, but leave me out of it.’”)4 O’Neill resented his father’s unsolicited counsel, but Carlin he listened to. Carlin reciprocated his young friend’s respect, though he had his number better than anyone: “Every soul is alone,” O’Neill would somberly declare. “No one in the world understands my slightest impulse.” “Then you don’t understand the slightest impulse of anyone else,” Carlin would respond.5
Hutchins Hapgood, an anarchist friend of Carlin’s, rented a summerhouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the outermost point of Cape Cod, where he and a group of his friends holed up to keep cool and let loose their creative energies. Hapgood and his wife, the writer Neith Boyce, had formed an amateur drama group in Provincetown the previous summer and were actively seeking new talent. O’Neill’s yearning for a theatrical breakthrough, some political troubles Carlin was up against with New York’s anarchist contingent, and the threat of the city’s summer swelter combined to make it a good time to leave town.
Summer 1916, Provincetown, Massachusetts
Provincetown is situated fifty miles out from the mainland on a continuously fluctuating spit of sand dunes, pine forests, and weathered houses. “Land’s End,” as the peninsula’s called, twists up and around on itself like a scorpion’s tail—east, north, west, south, and east again. Its harbor has a long tradition of attracting pathfinders; and by that time, the seaside village it protects from the brutal storms of the North Atlantic had become a hothouse of creative energy. Over six hundred artists migrated there that summer; by August, the Boston Globe would run an article under the headline “Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown.”6 O’Neill and Carlin, the two “wash ashores,” as they’d be designated by locals, arrived in late June.
Casting their eyes along the curve of the shoreline, the ragtail Irishmen no longer knew which direction they were facing—and no longer cared. “Sand and sun and sea and wind,” O’Neill wrote later of the rolling dunes and seascapes encircling the town, “you merge into them, and become as meaningless and as full of meaning as they are. There is always the monotone of surf on the bar—a background for silence—and you know that you are alone—so alone you wouldn’t be ashamed to do any good action. You can walk or swim along the beach for miles, and meet only the dunes—Sphinxes muffled in their yellow robes with paws deep in the sea.”7
But O’Neill and Carlin had a more immediate concern on their minds than the picturesque landscape—their lack of money—and Carlin suggested they “put the bite” on Hutchins Hapgood for $10. Nestled among an endless procession of gray-shingled houses on Commercial Street, Provincetown’s sand-strewn access road, Hapgood’s house was located in the arty East End district. Hapgood lent them the money, even though, as he suspected at the time and later confirmed, it would never be repaid.8 O’Neill and Carlin then temporarily moved into the studio of Bayard Boyesen, an outspoken anarchist they knew from Greenwich Village.
O’Neill, with a good word from Carlin, scheduled an audition with the experimental theater group that would soon become known as the Provincetown Players. The reading was to take place at the radical journalist John Reed’s house. Most of the Players knew Carlin from Greenwich Village, but O’Neill was a curiosity, “more unknown then than he’s famed now,” one of them remembered.9 They referred to him as the “son of James O’Neill,” the brilliant actor who’d sold his talent for the easy money of costumed romances and melodrama.10
“Jack” Reed loomed large in O’Neill’s imagination, even while O’Neill felt an unconquerable desire for Louise Bryant, Reed’s future wife. The journalist had gained notoriety three years earlier when he covered the Mexican Revolution and embedded for four months with the populist Mexican general Pancho Villa and his rebel army. O’Neill, hoping to impress Reed, got to work revising his one-act play The Movie Man, a vaudeville-style satire based on an actual 1914 Hollywood venture in the Mexican war, during which filmmakers had paid General Villa to let them film his battles.
On the night of O’Neill’s tryout, the brief walk from his new shack on the beach to Reed’s cottage must have seemed like a mile. The daunting assembly gathered there included Reed and Bryant, Hapgood and Boyce, labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, playwright Susan Glaspell, director George “Jig” Cram Cook (Glaspell’s husband), set designer Robert Edmond Jones, Provincetown’s “poet of the dunes,” Harry Kemp, and the enthralling red-haired actress Mary Pyne (Kemp’s wife). The Players had been growing restless; they aimed at nothing less than to upend the stale conventions of American theater. Expectations were high over this newcomer, scion of one of the most legendary matinee idols in America.
The night was a disaster. For nearly an hour, the Players’ eyes rolled as O’Neill muddled through The Movie Man. After he’d finished, the group eviscerated the work as “frightfully bad, trite and full of the most preposterous hokum.” Later, Harry Kemp scoffed at its abysmal plot: “Something about an American movie man who financed a Mexican revolution for the sake of filming its battles. One of the scenes depicted the hero’s compelling the commanding generals on both sides—both being in his hire—to wage a battle all over again because it had not been fought the way he liked it!”11 Not only was the story absurd, the script was borderline racist.12 Reed must have deplored it more than anyone. He knew Mexico and its struggling people well from firsthand reporting. O’Neill knew next to nothing about the country beyond what he’d learned from barrooms, newspapers, and movie house newsreels, and it showed.
O’Neill was highly sensitive to criticism at the time. The editor of the New London newspaper where he’d worked as a cub reporter four years earlier remembered young “Gene” as the temperamental sort who would “grieve like a stricken collie if you so much as looked an unkind thought at him.”13 Although surely devastated by his defeat, O’Neill wasn’t yet beaten.
By mid-July he was ready for a second audition, this time at Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook’s house, where he arrived clutching the script of Bound East for Cardiff, a one-act sea play based on his real-life experiences working on tramp steamers. The same players had assembled, and O’Neill must have sensed a heavy air of doubt. Near prostrate with dread, he sat stock-still in a wicker chair and slowly began to read, one of the Players recalled, “in his low, deep, slightly monotonous but compelling voice.”14 The Players listened silently—this time utterly enthralled.
“There was no one there during that reading who did not recognize the quality of this play,” wrote Mary Heaton Vorse years later. “Here was something new, the true feeling of the sea.”15 O’Neill’s dialogue was written exclusively in seamen’s banter and foreign dialects, and his stage directions offered, in intimate detail, a porthole into the stifling atmosphere of the seamen’s living quarters. Bound East for Cardiff signaled to the Players a radical departure: in it, O’Neill conveyed the sublime power of the sea through a profound sympathy for a working-class type that up to then had been voiceless on the American stage—and, fundamentally, in society at large. “We heard the actual speech of men who go to sea,” Harry Kemp recalled breathlessly. “We shared the reality of their lives; we felt the motion and windy, wave-beaten urge of a ship. This time, no one doubted that here was a genuine playwright.”16
Over the next forty years, O’Neill would go on to attain four Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize—the only American dramatist to be awarded that honor. Those triumphs and a great deal more can be traced back to that single midsummer evening in a crowded New England cottage where what has to be the most legendary story of discovery in American theater history had just come to pass.