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Eugene O'Neill's Exorcism

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.1.0001

2161-4318

Robert M. Dowling,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

The day I quit smoking was October 10, 2010. As part of my ongoing research on O'Neill, I had just interviewed the 101-year-old nurse Katherine Albertoni, who for years took care of the Nobel Prize–winning playwright. Now retired, Mrs. Albertoni lives on the West Coast, and I took advantage of the long flight back east to end the habit. Once home, I realized with frustration that writing up my notes on the interview was out of the question, much too heady a task in the early stages of withdrawal. To distract myself in those unexpected moments when the desire for a lungful became unbearable, I settled in front of the computer and conducted extensive Internet searches for O'Neill's lost one-act play Exorcism—the undisputed holy grail for generations of O'Neill scholars.After typing the words “Exorcism O'Neill manuscript archive” or some variation, I clicked through pages of university archives, foreign libraries, old-timey theater magazines, book dealers' websites, the papers of O'Neill's friends and associates. (The most profitable research is generally done at archives, of course, but these days, as with any profession I suspect, researchers ignore the Internet at their peril.) Any direct reference to the lost work would dwindle away after a page or two; lengthier searches based on subtle but promising leads would divulge themselves eventually as yet another freefall down the rabbit hole.The following June, at the Eighth International Conference on Eugene O'Neill, an astounding trace of the play's continued existence, in fact, surfaced at a preview of playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori's A Blizzard at Marblehead Neck, an operetta based on a violent quarrel between O'Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, that left O'Neill in traction and Carlotta institutionalized. During the talkback after the performance, an audience member mentioned how unfortunate it was that Exorcism no longer existed. “But it does exist!” shouted Arthur Gelb, a veteran O'Neill biographer. Gelb told me the following day that the dealer who bought the script had contacted him, but he hadn't yet seen or authenticated it. I redoubled my efforts online.The dispiriting tale of Exorcism's loss is well known among O'Neillians: After the play had a two-week run in 1920 at the Playwrights' Theatre in Greenwich Village, O'Neill contacted the Provincetown Players' secretary, M. Eleanor “Fitzie” Fitzgerald, and requested the return of all copies of the script, then destroyed them upon receipt. All that survived was one page of work diary notes and a handful of reviews that ran the gamut from the near rhapsodic (New York Times) to the patently disappointed (New York Tribune).1 In 1922 O'Neill wrote the bookstore proprietor Frank Shay that “‘Exorcism’ has been destroyed … and the sooner all memory of it dies the better pleased I'll be.”2Then one morning—Friday, September 16, 2011, to be exact—there it was. Near the bottom of the first search page was listed a notice from Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The caption at the bottom of its second page read: “Eugene O'Neill, ‘Exorcism: A Play in One Act,’ draft, typescript, corrected, 1919.” I called the Beinecke for a copy a few minutes later, and the librarian told me to check online in their digital images. Sure enough, the entire script had been uploaded. My next breathless hour or two was spent absorbing the play, utterly entranced, delighting over its references and echoes. Once the Beinecke's fiction and drama curator, Louise Bernard, learned I had accessed it, the images were immediately taken offline, within the hour in fact. Yale had negotiated a deal with the New Yorker, which acquired it for publication, agreeing to keep its existence under wraps until the release date. Not a bother. I already had it downloaded on my computer for later, more clearheaded scrutiny.A month after my sneak preview of Exorcism, the New Yorker stunned the literary world by publishing the script for the first time. Yale University Press then released it as a book that February. Yale University owns the rights to O'Neill's literary estate and has rubber-stamped this kind of “betrayal” before—publishing works that O'Neill explicitly wished to remain unpublished and/or unproduced. Long Day's Journey Into Night remains the most famous example: O'Neill stipulated to Bennett Cerf, his publisher at Random House, that the play be locked in a vault and “is to be published twenty-five years after my death—but never produced as a play.”3 Three years after O'Neill's death, Carlotta wrenched control of the publishing rights from Cerf and allowed its publication as a book in 1956 by Yale University Press, a long-awaited event preceded by acclaimed productions in Sweden and New York. Carlotta's motives aside, I must agree with Tony Kushner, a self-described O'Neill fanatic, that in the end her “betrayal of his wishes must be seen as an act of beneficence.”4The lost prequel of sorts to Long Day's Journey—O'Neill's tour de force and arguably the finest play ever written by an American—Exorcism was also believed to be an early sketch for another late masterwork, The Iceman Cometh. Set in mid-March 1912, five months before the action of Long Day's Journey, Exorcism was known to dramatize O'Neill's attempt to kill himself earlier that winter at the waterfront dive Jimmy the Priest's (located at the former site of the World Trade Center).5 This botched suicide attempt comes up in Long Day's Journey during an exchange between O'Neill's fictional avatar Edmund Tyrone and the father James. But in that otherwise revealing play O'Neill left unsaid the emotional turmoil that must have ensued among the Irish Catholic family after his all-too-brief marriage to, and humiliating divorce from, his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, not to mention the abandonment of his and Kathleen's child Eugene Jr. Exorcism and its protagonist, Ned Malloy, had the potential to fill in many gaps about the character Edmund Tyrone, and therefore, by association, his creator.As it happens, all of this turned out to be true.Divorce in New York State required proof of adultery provided by witnesses, and the testimonies at O'Neill's divorce trial on June 10, 1912, Kathleen O'Neill v. Eugene O'Neill in White Plains, New York, all substantiated the charge of adultery against the plaintiff. O'Neill was not required to attend the hearing. The following is a summary of what had occurred to establish the proof of adultery.On the night of December 29, 1911, O'Neill met with three members of Kathleen's mother Kate Jenkins's legal counsel, James C. Warren, his associates Edward Mullen and Frank Archibold, a friend of Archibold's named Mr. Reel, and O'Neill's friend and former apartment-mate Edward Ireland. They convened uptown at Ireland's apartment for dinner at 126 West 104th Street. A bar crawl began at a bar known as the Campus at 104th Street. Ireland returned home, but the rest headed downtown for more drinks at various watering holes and eventually landed at a brothel at 140 West 45th Street, across from the Lyceum Theater, at around 3 a.m., at which point Mr. Reel departed.After stalling about an hour on the main floor, O'Neill selected “some girl there that attracted him,” Mullen testified, and escorted her upstairs.6 The three remaining witnesses waited for two hours until O'Neill instructed a maid to call them up. They found O'Neill and the prostitute naked in bed and had a couple of drinks in the room with them. (No one at the deposition the following June mentioned O'Neill's state of mind that morning.) Legal duties fulfilled, all four left the brothel at half-past 6 or 7 a.m.That night, December 30, or possibly the following night, New Year's Eve, 1912, James Byth and another boarder at Jimmy the Priest's named Major Adams found O'Neill half-dead in his room. O'Neill had attempted to kill himself with an overdose of Veronal, an over-the-counter barbiturate then easily bought at any drugstore.Seven years later, O'Neill recounted this harrowing experience and his night with the prostitute in Exorcism. The play clearly takes place at Jimmy the Priest's, on the “top story of a squalid rooming house occupying the three upper floors of a building on a side street near the downtown waterfront, New York City—the ground floor being a saloon of the lowest type of grog shop.”7 Ned Malloy, O'Neill's autobiographical protagonist, is plagued by demons, and he has rejected advice to clear his mind by working on a farm in Minnesota. After returning from an evening with a prostitute, he recounts the experience to his roommate Jimmy (an unkind portrayal of the actual James Findlater Byth).“You know the law in New York,” Ned Malloy says. “There's only one ground that goes” (29). Ned outlines the night with the prostitute with angry self-abasement: “We arrived in the small hours and I was very drunk. I must have fallen asleep—almost immediately. When I awoke the room was strange to me. It wasn't dawn, it was mid-day, but it appeared like dawn, with faint streaks of light shedding from the edges of the green shades and the whole room in a sort of dead half-darkness…. The whole thing was no new experience—but I was afraid!” (31). This story of a gray dawn spent with a prostitute recalls similar stories associated with O'Neill's brother James (known as Jim or Jamie), most vividly the experience recounted in A Moon for the Misbegotten, which has Jim Tyrone as its protagonist.Both Ned and Jim Tyrone (in Moon) describe the prostitutes who take part in their undoing as “pigs,” and Ned awakes with the prostitute to a gray light coming in the windows, just as Jim Tyrone does repeatedly.8 “I've seen too God-damned many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows,” Jim tells Josie Hogan in Moon. Ned also, like Jim, uses the word “rotten” to capture the depths of his self-loathing: “Everything I had ever done, my whole life—all life—had become too rotten! My head had been pushed under, I was drowning and the thick slime of loathing poured down my throat—strangling me!” (32).When left alone, Ned swallows a handful of pills, lies down in a fetal position, and mutters, “Well, that's over” (34). Jimmy and Major Andrews (Major Adams) find him unconscious and save him by calling a doctor, who pumps his stomach and tells them to walk him around the block. His father arrives to console him and convinces him to go to a rest cure sanatorium. Ned agrees, then also decides that he will, after all, go out west with his friend Nordstrum. Ned has thus been resurrected from the grave, his demons “exorcised.” Keeping in mind O'Neill's lifelong compulsion to project onto the stage emotions impossible for him to express otherwise, I agree with Louis Sheaffer that the script of Exorcism must be considered “the most reliable index of Eugene's frame of mind after his suicide attempt.”9These few days described in Exorcism were some of the most traumatic of O'Neill's actual life, and scholars have picked at and puzzled over them for decades. Prior to the discovery of Exorcism, the two most important narrations of O'Neill's suicide attempt have been George Jean Nathan's in his “intimate notebooks” (1932) and Agnes Boulton's in her memoir Part of a Long Story (1958). Neither of them has been taken seriously. Louis Sheaffer called Nathan's story a “farce,” O'Neill's “attempt to wipe out the confession by joking about it”; the Gelbs discount Nathan's as “implausible”; and Doris Alexander considered them both “farcical fairy tales … by those two reckless fictionalizers.”10Both accounts embellish O'Neill's psychic calamity with details of raucous drunken behavior, and both conclude with O'Neill being escorted by the drunks at the bar to Bellevue Hospital. Boulton's account, however, strikes me as far more legitimate than Nathan's, particularly its understanding of the rationale for his suicide. Along with her own version of the suicide attempt, she quotes long passages of O'Neill telling her (in a monologue so long as to make the Gelbs speculate that he must have written it down, since the language so precisely echoes his voice) that upon arriving back at Jimmy the Priest's after the brothel episode, on the morning of December 30 he had hoped to find a check from his father.11 There was no check. Significantly, Boulton repeats this several times. The absent check not only deprived him of the cash he needed to keep his room at Jimmy the Priest's (and keep drinking), but also signaled a complete abandonment by his parents—“of this he was sure now.” She also adds that he was troubled not to have his brother Jamie there “to talk things over with,” that “he couldn't stand his thoughts anymore,” that he felt disgusted by his experience with the prostitute, and that he was regretful for having involved Kathleen, “who seemed like himself just another pawn of fate.”12 For someone with suicidal tendencies, any one of these torments might well have nudged him over the edge. Combined, they would be more than sufficient.O'Neill told Boulton that he returned to Jimmy the Priest's and, finding no check from his father, dispensed with what money he had, two drinks' worth, and collected enough Veronal tablets from various pharmacies to kill himself. In Exorcism, he tells Jimmy that he went from the brothel to Battery Park and remained there for six hours. That puts the date of his attempt at December 30 or 31, 1911.Why, then, did O'Neill set the play in mid-March instead of late December when the actual events took place? The answer seems clear once we read the full script: March is the gateway month to springtime. Pipe dreams, or what Ned calls “abject illusions” (17), figure strongly as a leitmotif in Exorcism, and Jimmy and the Major repeat stories similar to those we hear later in The Iceman Cometh—O'Neill's extended meditation on the life-sustaining power of pipe dreams. But an even more resonant theme is “spring,” its promise for renewal, and its connection to the Resurrection. The word “spring,” in fact, is uttered ten times in the first scene alone. “Cheer up!” Jimmy pleads. “It's the middle of March now. Spring will soon be here.” “That's a blessing,” Ned sarcastically responds (10, 11). Ned cajoles Jimmy later for pestering him about it: “Oh, to hell with spring! What significance can spring have to you—or to me—or any of the others in this hold?” With a lump in his throat, Jimmy responds, “Spring means something to me that you can't very well understand, Ned. There have been springs in my life—in better days—when—” (16). Not until Ned's return to consciousness in the second scene does he accept the notion of personal renewal and, after agreeing to travel west with his friend, toasts “the new life, reform or no reform, as long as it's new. To spring—and fresh air—and Minnesota” (55).13Boulton's and Nathan's stories conclude with a drunken celebration among O'Neill and his saviors over his resurrection—precisely the way Exorcism ends, also The Iceman Cometh. Exorcism's dramatic structure is a duplicate, in miniature, of Iceman, from the men in the bar (several of the same characters) with their pipe dreams and distorted and annoyingly repetitious self-delusions, to the final scene with the men drinking and singing a cacophonous blend of songs. Thirteen different songs are howled at the conclusion of Iceman to celebrate the resurrection of their pipe dreams. One of them, “You Great Big Beautiful Doll,” sung by Rocky the bartender, is sung by Nordstrum in Exorcism, while Ned sings “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” All of this is meant to seem rather silly, but silly in an anticlimactic way that starkly contrasts with the pain of the less fortunate among them: Larry Slade in Iceman finds his pipe dream of wishing for death has come true; and Jimmy in Exorcism “weeps brokenheartedly at the heartlessness of his fellow men” when the curtain falls (57). Edward Albee identifies this as the play's most serious defect, the “anti-dramatic second and final scene, which takes the play nowhere and has little to do with dramatic logic.”14O'Neill subtitled the play, as we see in the Provincetown Players' program bill but not on the surviving manuscript, “A Play of Anti-Climax”—and so it was.15 Jasper Deeter, who played Ned, told Sheaffer that O'Neill “wrote both ‘Exorcism’ and ‘Diff'rent’ as exercises in anti-climax, experiments, not exercises, because so much in our lives is anti-climax and he wanted to put it into the theatre.” (He added that O'Neill had gotten the idea from Strindberg.) “When the curtains opened on the second scene,” he remembered, “I felt like this: ‘Here we are trying to do something impossible for a man who thought that nothing was impossible. ‘Let's go.’”16O'Neill destroyed Exorcism in a retroactive assertion of privacy that clearly foreshadows his later caution about publishing Long Day's Journey Into Night. As closely autobiographical as Long Day's Journey and The Straw, Exorcism is set five months before Long Day's Journey and a year before The Straw, a full-length play that dramatizes his time in 1913 at Gaylord Farm Sanatorium for tubercular patients, which was written, along with Exorcism, in 1919. A Moon for the Misbegotten, the last play O'Neill ever completed, takes up his older brother Jim's tragic life, a living death really, over a decade later. In light of this insistent return to painful personal episodes, O'Neill's decision to remove the play from the historical record has been a mystery for decades, and it continues to be even now that we have the script.Of course, he might have decided that it was far too personal for public consumption, especially while his father was deathly ill, and a character based on his father makes an appearance in the final scene. Some believed that O'Neill replaced Veronal with morphine, and that the drug's mention would be too upsetting to the family, given his mother's addiction. This no longer makes sense, however, since the drug is never mentioned in the script. More likely, as biographer Stephen Black has suggested, “his parents complained to him after hearing about the play, and the complaint led him to see it from his family's point of view.”17 And, yes, the play may not have stood up to his artistic standard, as Albee postulates in his foreword.Each reason sounds logical enough and surely has some bearing in truth. But it seems to me that O'Neill struck it from his oeuvre for an equally, if not more pressing reason than any of these. In Exorcism, the whole sordid affair of his elopement with Kathleen, who is named Margaret in the script, was revealed to anyone with the price of a ticket, including his destitute existence in the years that followed and his eventual suicide attempt. To me this is the most remarkable aspect of this play, the insight it gives into O'Neill's apparent feelings about his first marriage.Two of O'Neill's three wives, Agnes Boulton and Kathleen herself, admitted publicly how strange it must have seemed to audiences that O'Neill neglected to mention Kathleen and their son, Eugene Jr., in Long Day's Journey. Boulton wrote in Part of a Long Story, “It was just that Gene was like that…. Who, after having seen Long Day's Journey Into Night, would ever realize that Edmund, the younger son, had been married and divorced and was the father of a child nearly three years old on that August evening in 1912?”18 Indeed, one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama-behind-the-drama is that Boulton, who had retained and ensured the continued existence of the only surviving copy, after countless interviews with journalists and biographers and a memoir about her early years with O'Neill (which recounts his suicide attempt, but makes no mention of Exorcism), respected O'Neill's privacy to her death in 1968. Nowhere did she ever betray the fact that the much-coveted script still existed.Kathleen, for her part, told the New York Post that she was “very glad” she and Eugene Jr. went unmentioned in Long Day's Journey. “It was so absolutely outside anything that was between us,” she said. “A great deal happened to both of us since then. It seems way back in the dark ages.”19 Neither Kathleen nor O'Neill appeared to hold a grudge, and she requested no alimony or child support and was granted sole custody of Eugene Jr. A few years later, she married George Pitt-Smith and took an editorial job at the Ledger in Little Neck, Long Island. In hindsight, O'Neill remarked to his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, “The woman I gave the most trouble to has given me the least.”20Nothing gives more credibility to that pointed comment than the script of Exorcism. In its opening scene, Jimmy asks Ned Malloy about his marriage. “I wouldn't forgive or forget the fact that I despise her,” Ned says (26). Jimmy responds, “But didn't you—don't you care for her at all?” “Not a damn!” Ned shouts back. “Not a single, solitary, infinitesimal tinker's damn! I never did! Body—that was what I wanted in her and she in me. And I married her for an obsolete reason—a gentleman's reason, you'd call it…. That's all it was, so help me—a silly gesture of honor—and a stunt!” (27–28). Jimmy then asks if Margaret really wants a divorce. “Of course,” he says. “She's rich. She'll be married again within a year. Her pinhead won't even retain a memory of what happened to her two years ago” (29). Along with the “silly gesture” of marrying her for “honor” (presumably because, like Kathleen, she had gotten pregnant), he also admits here that he did so “because a perverse devil whispered in my ear that marriage was one of those few things I hadn't done” (28). Even after his “rebirth,” Ned is informed that Margaret went “out of her mind with grief,” assuming he attempted suicide because she's suing him for divorce. Ned says, “Aha! So that's what she thinks! The devil!” (47). And on it goes. Ned's insulting portrayal of Margaret throughout the play, and thus O'Neill's of Kathleen, must have played a key role—I would argue the key role—in O'Neill's decision to eradicate the play from his oeuvre.With that in mind, there has always seemed to me an imbalance in Long Day's Journey, a symphonic play that demands a sense of equilibrium among the four principles if it is to be performed well. Of the four Tyrones—James (based on O'Neill's father), Jamie (his older brother), Mary (his mother), and Edmund (O'Neill himself)—Edmund comes off as far less culpable than the other three. He's blamed mainly for having been born, since it was his birth that initiated Mary's descent into morphine addiction (the future playwright weighed in at eleven pounds). He's also diagnosed with tuberculosis, which appears to have initiated, or at least exacerbated, Mary's relapse into her addiction. O'Neill wrote that he composed the play “with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”21 But only three of the Tyrones have flaws that require forgiveness: Jamie is jealous of and spiteful toward his brother; Mary relapses; and James is a miser (the elemental cause for most of the family's suffering). None of them can be blamed on any moral level, since forces beyond their control led them to act out against the people they love most. (Jamie comes out the worst, perhaps, but O'Neill rectified that to an extent by writing A Moon for the Misbegotten.)Edmund Tyrone, on the other hand, is, at bottom, a blameless victim of his family members' assorted dysfunctions. Each of the other three Tyrones attempts to defend Edmund from the other two. “I've tried to make allowances for myself when I remember all the rotten stuff I've pulled,” he tells his father, which is the most pronounced evidence we have in the play that he “pulled” anything at all. His suicide attempt does come up: When James Tyrone characterizes Edmund's adventures abroad as “a game of romance and adventure…. It was play,” Edmund responds with acerbic irony, “Yes, particularly the time I tried to commit suicide at Jimmie the Priest's, and almost did.”22 Whatever emotional fallout that ensued pertaining to his ex-wife and child goes untouched.The discovery of Exorcism, in short, has revealed to us what I have long considered the missing Edmund in the form of Ned Malloy. In this play, Ned is as autobiographical as Edmund but with considerable personality differences. (“Ned” is a nickname for “Edmund,” the actual name of O'Neill's older brother who died of measles as a toddler.) Ned is bitter, spiteful, self-absorbed, an emotional bully to friends and family, and insensitive to their deep concern for his well-being. In this way he's redolent of another close avatar of O'Neill's, Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown (1925).Ned, like Dion, is a middle-class young man whom Alexander Woollcott described in his New York Times review as “so full of contempt for [his parents] that he has walked out, head high, and fallen into the gutter.”23 Ned's mouth, like Dion's mask, is “twisted by a bitter, self-mocking irony” (5). (Margaret, not incidentally, is also the name O'Neill gives Dion's own long-suffering but adoring wife.) Each character epitomizes, along with James Tyrone Jr. in Long Day's Journey and A Moon for the Misbegotten, the unique O'Neillian archetype of the wounded soul so utterly disappointed with himself and life in general that he takes it out not only on himself but on those who love them most, suicide being the maximum pain one can inflict upon caring survivors.24Debates predictably erupted over the ethics of publishing Exorcism at all. Is it fair that O'Neill's legacy is not precisely how he wished it after the publication of Exorcism, a play he attempted to erase from historical memory? For me this dilemma can only be answered with another question: What author has ever enjoyed that luxury? Kafka? Dickinson? Even Shakespeare—the one writer one might think would have little to complain about insofar as reputation is concerned—must endure the odd Hollywood movie about the truth behind his authorship.I would add one last anecdote:This past spring was my first opportunity to include Exorcism on the syllabus of my O'Neill seminar. On the final day, I ended by asking two simple questions: Which were your favorite O'Neill plays, which your least favorite? I was astonished by how many students chose Exorcism, out of over twenty-five possibilities, as one of their top picks. Quite a few chose it as their favorite—on a list that included Long Day's Journey and The Iceman Cometh, two of the most revered plays of the twentieth century. One student made it a point to admit that she didn't know whether her choice was a result of the autobiographical drama surrounding the drama or because she enjoyed the play on its own merit. For now, the distinction to me is close to irrelevant. I'm just grateful that Exorcism—and Long Day's Journey and any other artifact that enlightens us about the life and work of so remarkable a dramatist—has been made available to us at long last.Time now to unwrap a Nicorette and resume my search, launched on Friday, September 16, 2011, for O'Neill's long-lost 1917 short story “The Hairy Ape.” (I understand it's a precursor to his groundbreaking play of the same title.)