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The Texts of O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.35.1.0015

2161-4318

Alexander Pettit,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Beyond the Horizon appeared in two editions within four and a half years. The first, published March 1920, printed a text that O'Neill probably completed in 1918 but may have tweaked for publication. It has not been reprinted since 1922, has never been edited, and was only recently reissued online.1 The second edition incorporated collaborative cuts made during a boozy span in mid-January 1920, prior to the play's February 3 premiere. That edition debuted in O'Neill's 1924 Complete Works and has been the basis of all subsequent editions. These are different texts, written at different times and representing different assumptions about authorship. Both are essential to our understanding of O'Neill. But I am aware of no study of the play or of O'Neill that engages the first-edition text.My purpose is threefold. First, I will consolidate and clarify the textual history of Beyond the Horizon. Second, I will enumerate significant differences between the two editions, with special attention to the generosity that O'Neill initially accorded to Ruth Mayo, the depressive wife of the poet manqué Robert Mayo. Finally, I will argue that in the first edition O'Neill ponders the challenge of melding art and marriage in a gender-savvy manner reflective of his relationship with Agnes Boulton and characteristic of his fellow Provincetown playwrights Neith Boyce and Rita Wellman. The argument attempts to restore to Ruth a measure of dignity that O'Neill briefly allowed her, then withdrew. Judith E. Barlow discerns in the 1924 text “the venerable myth that domesticity, even when freely chosen, kills the male of the species” and “annihilat[es]” his “artistic soul.”2 But the first edition attempts something more ambitious, thanks to O'Neill's entry into the debate about “the problems inherent in male-female relationships, both inside and outside of marriage” that Barlow finds lively among female playwrights of the Players.3O'Neill began writing Beyond the Horizon in Winter 1918, during the early days of his cohabitation with Boulton in Provincetown.4 On April 14, two days after he and Boulton had married, O'Neill declared himself “up to the ears” in preparing the script for the producer John D. Williams, to whom George Jean Nathan had been singing his praises.5 O'Neill soon posted copies of his script to Nathan and to Williams, who, as Stephen Black notes, optioned the play “almost immediately.”6 By April 26, the happily capitalized newlyweds were headed to New York to see the Provincetown Players' production of O'Neill's The Rope.7Black reports that O'Neill “began cutting and revising” the play after he and Boulton returned to Provincetown and that O'Neill “obtained a second copyright in early August for the revised version.”8 Evidently satisfied with his work, O'Neill set about soliciting comments from his former professor George Pierce Baker and his future biographer Barrett Clark. The process advanced slowly. O'Neill was partly to blame: having sent a typescript or carbon to Nathan and one or two to Williams, he apparently left himself short on copies.9 O'Neill's later reference to Nathan as the play's “godfather” notwithstanding, the critic seems not expeditiously to have returned O'Neill's copy.10 Clark reports that O'Neill wrote him in 1919, asking if he would read Beyond the Horizon “when I retrieve a borrowed script.”11 Nathan is the likeliest delinquent, and the deference with which O'Neill regarded him at this stage of their friendship argues against the possibility that O'Neill would have badgered him about the script. By May 8, 1919, Clark had registered what O'Neill called his “favorable impression” of the play.12 O'Neill wrote to Baker the next day requesting permission to send him scripts of Beyond the Horizon and two other plays. But Clark may have been no quicker to surrender his copy than Nathan seems to have been. On June 8, O'Neill assured Baker that he had “tried hard to get a script of Beyond the Horizon” to him but added that “retrieving a borrowed script seems to be more difficult than selling the play.”13 Meanwhile, Williams dithered and O'Neill fumed.14Although O'Neill was having trouble motivating his readers and his producer, he had plenty to keep him busy during the twenty months between Williams's optioning of the play and his decision to stage it.15 Presumably he would have made time to revise Beyond the Horizon in response to comments from his readers, but the printed record contains no mention of any such suggestions or any evidence that he revisited his script during this period. By early November 1919, Boni and Liveright had agreed to publish the play, the second copyrighted version, we may assume.16 Again the published record does not mention revisions.This account is long on speculation and not immune from error. At the least, however, it suggests that O'Neill, having had his script vetted by Nathan, Clark, maybe Baker, and either or both Albert Boni and Horace Liveright, had reason to consider his work complete, the more so given his unfamiliarity with the sort of last-minute revision common in commercial drama. This helps explain his peevishness upon finding out in January 1920 that Williams was insisting upon cuts to a script that, its daunting length aside, had passed muster with readers whom O'Neill respected.17The pruning took place from January 13 to 16, 1920. O'Neill reviewed suggested cuts until 2:00 a.m. on January 14, trying to meet Williams's demand to return an approved script by noon that day. His inability to do so reflects his opinion that although “a great many” of Williams's suggestions were acceptable, “some are very silly and I will not stand for them.”18 A marathon follow-up that began on January 15 found him working first with Williams and leading man Richard Bennett and then, until 7:30 a.m. on January 16, with Bennett and a bottle of Pernod.19 Bennett's suggestions were based on his blue-penciling of the script in November 1919, of which O'Neill had been ignorant. According to Bennett's daughter Joan Bennett, Williams too “had been making judicious cuts around this time.”20 O'Neill's resistance to their recommendations would be softened by the alcohol and, on January 17, a calmer O'Neill informed Boulton that “the Beyond script is now straightened out.”21 We do not know which cuts O'Neill welcomed and which he endured, but the play that emerged from these sessions was substantially different from the play that O'Neill had brought to them. O'Neill had become a commercial playwright, compliant in the sometimes vexing systems of collaboration that the designation implies.The first edition appeared on March 10, 1920, later than Liveright wanted but in time to capitalize on the success of a play often unlike the one it presented.22 Four reprints appeared before December 1922, suggesting adequate sales.23 As noted above, the second (1924) edition would incorporate the January 1920 cuts. Contrary to a tenacious critical tradition, however, the 1924 text did not include ad hoc revisions for the Complete Works. In 1947 Clark asserted that “when O'Neill prepared it [i.e., Beyond the Horizon] for republication some years after its first production, he reduced its bulk by at least-one fifth.”24 Clark, who does not mention the January 1920 sessions, presumably reached this conclusion by comparing the first and second editions. In 1959, Croswell Bowen and Shane O'Neill made nonsense of Clark's statement by claiming that “when [O'Neill] prepared it [i.e., Beyond the Horizon] for publication, he cut one fifth of it.”25 But neither Bowen nor Shane would have had access to the manuscripts necessary to make such a calculation. Neither, sadly, is Shane's memory to be trusted. Ronald Wainscott did not help when he acknowledged that O'Neill had cut the play in response to Bennett's concerns but referenced Bowen and Shane in asserting that O'Neill had excised “another 20 percent for publication.”26 Given that the first edition was in the press during the January sessions, Wainscott must mean that O'Neill undertook a massive revision around 1924, that is, for re-publication. This brings us back to Clark's unsupported claim.No evidence has been adduced in support of these interlocking assertions, nor I suspect is any forthcoming. O'Neill's “work diary” for 1924 is quiet on the matter, except for an entry dated October 11, 1924: “[read] proofs [of] ‘Beyond the Horizon’ &. ‘Diff'rent’ &. cuts” (13).27 O'Neill means that he had read proofs of the January 1920 text, not of a further revision. He implied as much in his October 12 remark that reading the set in proof is “a hell of a job but it does serve to acquaint me with stuff that is so forgotten, it's new.”28 Firmer evidence is at hand. The Complete Works record a 1920 copyright for Beyond the Horizon, held by Boni and Liveright. Acting editions published well after 1924 by Random House and Dramatists Play Service jointly, and by DPS alone, record a 1921 copyright in O'Neill's name. Initial collation suggests that the second edition, the Random House-DPS edition, and the DPS edition are verbally identical.29 The earlier copyright date indicates that O'Neill's publisher, having copyrighted a different text for the first edition, subsequently copyrighted the revision. The later date in the DPS and Random House-DPS editions presumably indicates that O'Neill took out a new copyright of the revision in his own name, perhaps after entering minor changes that have escaped detection. Some uncertainty about the copyrights lingers, but the evidence nonetheless shows that O'Neill had completed his revision by 1921 at the latest. Probably he had done so earlier. No printed evidence suggests that O'Neill altered the script in 1921, and in any case he was pleased with the January 1920 cuts. Even before the play opened he took credit for “supervision of the cutting” and acknowledged that the script had benefited from the additional attention.30 It is difficult to imagine what incentive he could have felt further to revise a successful play that he already completed—at least twice.The assumptions underlying the canard of a circa 1924 revision situate Beyond the Horizon in the late twentieth-century debate about authorship and textual authority. Jerome McGann, the provocateur, criticized the unselfconscious habit among scholarly editors of “imagin[ing] writing and the production of texts as a solitary activity.” Rather, he argued, “[the] author's intentions are always operating along with nonauthorial intentions, that each presupposes the other, and that no text ever came into being, or could come into being, without interactions between the two.”31 McGann's overarching “nonauthorial” category relates to the economically motivated production of print, a joint endeavor as any published author will appreciate. (“Nonauthorial” factors are uniquely abundant in commercial drama, though McGann has no cause to say so.) Their own intentions aside, Clark and his successors obscure the McGannian “social nexus” that produced the second edition of O'Neill's play—its status as a text created collaboratively and with the unremarkable goal of attracting a paying public.32 Although I would not want to overstate the point, we reinforce this bias every time we refer to the 1924 text as “O'Neill's.” The words are his but their juxtapositioning is his, Williams's, and Bennett's. O'Neill—a prickly writer with pretentions as a poet—could not have considered the distinction trivial.The second edition of Beyond the Horizon thus prints a text produced in conformity with the tenets of what has become the McGannian orthodoxy. The editorial preference for the second edition accords with an earlier orthodoxy, too, as representing the author's final intention for his work. Not only did O'Neill decline further to revise his text for the Complete Works, but he also decided against reprinting the first edition in that set. Had O'Neill come to regret the revisions, he could have selected the earlier (previously typeset) text for the Complete Works, published like the first edition by Boni and Liveright. He did not. The editorial preference for the second-edition text has ample validity in theory.This is not to say that the debate has been properly theorized. Indeed, because the publication history of Beyond the Horizon has developed without reference to theories of editing (the unselfconsciousness that McGann lamented), it has lacked the mechanisms of its own interrogation. The upshot is the reflexive acceptance of one text that happens to be based on a certain conception of authorship and the concomitant rejection of a precedent text that was conceived quite differently. Our avoidance of the 1920 edition is essentially arbitrary and, insofar as it circumscribes primary evidence, injurious to the practice of criticism. Furthermore, the accepted text was completed at least three years earlier than we had thought, separated from its archetype by a brief interlude during which the playwright realized the necessity of acquiescing in the “social” demands of those on whom the success of his play depended. A study of O'Neill in performance, O'Neill as a commercial artist, or O'Neill after 7:30 a.m. on January 17, 1920, should emphasize the second edition. A study of the younger O'Neill—the O'Neill more deeply enmeshed in the Provincetown milieu, more recently married to another professional writer, and more easily able to insist upon the primacy of his own artistic judgment—should prefer the first edition, regardless of the practice of editors, publishers, and previous critics.The January 1920 sessions created substantially new characters carrying different thematic loads. Cumulatively, the effect of the cuts is to strip Ruth Mayo of reasons for being who she is and thereby to imply a greater strength of character in Robert Mayo. Bennett's and Williams's instigation of the revisions is germane. Bennett, a successful actor, wanted a role to suit his status; Williams knew that the play could rise or fall on the strength of Bennett's performance. The cuts put the spotlight squarely on the character that Bennett wanted to play, as it had not been quite so consistently in the precedent text. When in 1920 William Prichard Eaton wrote that “the character spiral of Beyond the Horizon goes neither up nor down, but inward to the point of annihilation,” he was commenting on the newly published first edition.33 The second edition does not authorize this uniform representation of character. There Ruth is the annihilator and Robert the annihilated. Robert is the butt of capricious fate, and Ruth's ongoing enmeshment in mundane sordor is evidence of her shallowness, not, as in the first edition, of her ironic exclusion from the apotheosis in which the killer of her dreams glories.Eaton does not speak ill of Ruth, nor does Gilbert Seldes in a review that favorably compared the 1920 edition to the play in performance.34 The disinterested analyses of Eaton and Seldes could not be farther from the axe-grinding reception of Ruth recurrent in reviews of the performed play and in criticism based on the 1924 text. In its review of the premiere, Theatre Magazine initiated a tradition that would over time become less crass but no more kind. Ruth, the reviewer declared, is “a dullard, common, stupid, slovenly, uninterested in the world's progress, and lacking in amiability in the bargain.” Although she (or even less relevantly the actress Helen McKellar) has a “fairly good figure,” she “isn't even a good housekeeper.” The tubercular Robert's waning moments are described with a Dumasian attentiveness, and Robert dies “dreaming of ‘what might have been’ had he taken the road of his dreams, instead of trudging along the wrong matrimonial lane.” Ruth's arc is simpler: as she works darkly on Robert's supposed genius, she “grows still more slouchy and unattractive.”35This review would be easy to dismiss had its biases not endured. Ruth has since been described as exemplifying a “feminine” instinct “that seeks to dominate, even to suffocate the masculine instinct”; as “not only lustful but dishonest” and as “subject to passionate fits of self-assertion”; as “wear[ing] the stain of the fallen Eve” and “punished to live in a hell on earth”; as manifesting “a manipulatively virginal, but willfully destructive, nature”; and as “not even lik[ing] motherhood.”36 Time has been stingy with its healing balm: in 2011, Ruth was damned as “the sort of O'Neill heroine who tempts a man sexually and then later ruins his life because she cannot support the artist's artistic imagination and need to create.”37 Only Doris Falk, writing in 1958, has represented husband and wife as equally in the thrall of hopeless but not contemptible aspiration, although a decade earlier St. John Ervine offered a dyspeptic anticipation of Falk's egalitarianism when he judged Ruth “little better than” Robert.38These condemnations of Ruth are versions of the “venerable myth” that Barlow faults the play for promoting, and it is unpleasant to find them still being endorsed. But the difference between these accounts and Barlow's judicious formulation concerns the attractiveness of O'Neill's enterprise, not its nature. The most sobering aspect of the diminution of Ruth is that it is to some extent defensible—given its mooring in the 1924 text. The first edition authorizes other lines of inquiry. Because that text is unfamiliar even to most O'Neillians, a detailed summary is in order, accenting significant differences between it and the second edition. Except as noted, quoted passages are unique to the earlier text, as is much of the reported material.39The play's opening discovers Robert daydreaming over a book of poetry, thus qualifying for the mockery of his robust brother Andrew, who as usual has been working on the family farm. “You surely were never cut out for a farmer” (4), Andrew opines, initiating a mutual remembrance of Robert's sickly childhood and his troubles in school, academic and athletic. Their father James arrives. He greets his sons as “a pair of hens” (6) and joins the raillery before discussing work with Andrew. James and Andrew bait Robert back into the conversation by unfavorably comparing farming to reading, to which Robert responds, as Peter Pan might, “I'm never going to grow up—if I can help it” (8). With this declaration in mind, we are surprised to learn that Robert has signed on for three years at sea with his uncle, Dick Scott, the more so as the talk keeps circling back to the “delicateness” that, O'Neill knew, would have made Robert a lousy tar (11). But Robert jettisons these plans with an abrupt proposal of marriage to Andrew's presumed wife-to-be, Ruth Atkins, whose entrance follows Andrew's exit and who immediately starts complaining about her wheelchair-bound mother, crippled by Ruth's birth and becoming “more irritable every day” (16–17). Mrs. Atkins's invalidism leads this discussion, too, back to Robert's history of ill health, which the once-tubercular O'Neill revisits obsessively in this version.Robert's sudden status as a pitcher of woo is not coincident with a spike in his maturity. A place-bound Othello, he dazzles the admittedly dim Ruth by confessing his durable belief in fairies, of which, he allows, “he ought to have been ashamed from a boy's standpoint.” He hears the fairies calling still, “although I'm a man and have seen the other side of many hills” (21–22). This suffices as seduction, although Ruth informs her fiancé that even if her mother were healthy she “wouldn't want to live in any of those outlandish places” that Robert had planned to visit (24). She is, she admits, “just a home body” (25) who in both versions contents herself with imagining a future of “be[ing] so happy” with Robert on the farm (25 [1st ed.]; 583 [2nd ed.]). Sprinting past this caveat, Robert declares their love “the meaning of all life, the whole world,” adding, “the kingdom of heaven is within—us” (26). Neither has heard a word that the other has said, a truer statement about young love than O'Neill has been credited with making.James and Dick respond skeptically to news of the engagement, but Mrs. Mayo responds with delight, having confessed her fear that Robert will “be taken down ill … miles from land” with “no one to take care of him” (32). Dick had figured that Robert would benefit from “learn[ing] to forget all that baby coddlin'” (38). The idea of bringing Ruth on the voyage is raised, ridiculed, then discarded due to the needs of Mrs. Atkins. Still chafing at being treated like an “invalid” (44), Robert promises to become a good farmer and a good provider for Ruth and her mother. Dick thrice remarks on the loneliness he will face at sea. (Only one of these references survives in the second edition.) Andrew offers to take Robert's place on Dick's ship, prompting a contretemps between Dick and James, who is understandably anxious about trusting the farm to his infirm and dewy younger son. James curses Andrew, then insults his brother-in-law: “Shut up, you—you Dick!” (55). An exchange between the brothers indicates the seriousness of the wound inflicted on Andrew by what he tactfully declines to call his brother's betrayal. Robert recognizes that “I ought to be asking your forgiveness for the suffering I've brought on you” (61). He stops short of doing so.The second act establishes Mrs. Atkins as a true harridan, contemptuous of Robert, critical of Ruth, and given to the taunting lionization of the absent Andrew. The couple has produced a daughter, now two years old, and the young mother is depressed, bent near to breaking by her own ghastly mother, her foundering marriage, her increasing poverty, and her resentment at young Mary's grating if psychologically unremarkable preference for the father who is gone all day, albeit with nothing to show for his absence. Mrs. Atkins foments discord. At the end of a tough day, Ruth snaps and threatens Mary with a spanking, which Robert forbids. A furious Ruth comes close to calling him a failure. “A fine one you are to be telling folks how to do things” (79; 610), she says in both editions, before adding in the first edition, “you — —” (79). After tempers abate, Robert whines, “You know how unsuited I am to the work and how I hate it” (82). Moving outside and sickening, Robert tells Mary of “the good fairies” who live “where the sea and sky meet” before peevishly advising her against this belief, which he has come to regard as an invitation to “bad luck,” rather than, say, evidence of infantilism (94).Andrew returns. The brothers discuss Robert's health and Ruth's mother, an “old rip,” the elder observes (98). Andrew describes the nautical life in a Conradian manner incompatible with Robert's decadent mode of literary imagination. Although “the Chinks and Japs and Hindus” didn't register well with Andrew (101), he found fortune in Buenos Aires. Andrew offers to loan Robert money and to secure the services of “a real man” to supervise the property (104). Robert declines and falls deeper into debt. Ruth is briefly enlivened by Andrew's return but responds indifferently to his suggestion that Robert “get a job in town on a newspaper, or something connected with writing” (110). Her fantasy of a revived romance with her brother-in-law is shattered by Andrew's cruelty in dismissing his younger self as “foolish” and “not responsible” for having loved her (113). He has pretty much forgotten about the tempestuous past, though he remains “darned cut up” about “the awful scrap I'd had with Pa” (114). Andrew departs.Five years pass, and the farm is in a state of collapse. Mary has died; Robert's tuberculosis is revenant; and Andrew is due to return with a pulmonologist, an alternative to the “cheap old quack” available locally (128). Robert proposes a “new start” with Ruth, transparently presenting the whim as “not just a dream, but something tangible, something already within our grasp!” (132–33). Ruth humors him, knowing he will soon die; later, she tells her mother that Robert had talked as “he used to talk—only mad, kind of” (135). Mrs. Atkins reveals that “years ago” she stripped Robert of his authority over her part of the families' amalgamated property (135).Andrew's final return finds him worried and testy. As Robert had been during the spousal argument, Andrew is alternately insulting and apologetic in his exchanges with Ruth. He promises again to “get a real man” to handle the property (144). The specialist confirms Ruth's suspicion that Robert is near death. Robert insists that Andrew “marry Ruth—afterward,” an injunction that has no evident appeal to Andrew (153; 647). Hard on the heels of this unpleasant development, Andrew tells Ruth that had he been Robert, aware that she had taunted him with her love for his brother, “I'd have killed myself—or killed you” (157). He imagines, melodramatically, that Ruth's revelation of her love for him has bound her and Robert in a “horrible secret”; more earthily, Ruth replies that it has condemned them to living “not as man and wife” (157). She disregards Andrew's order to tell Robert that she had claimed to love Andrew only to spite his brother, that is, to make herself the fall guy that Andrew needs. Robert has crawled out of his window into the dappling sunset, there to lament his lack of “courage” in failing “to live my dream,” the particulars of which remain murky (162). Gasping his last, he declares “I'm free!” (163). Andrew's eulogy is unconventional: “He's dead because you've killed him, do you hear?” (164). He begs forgiveness, but the last plea Ruth will hear from either brother is futile. In both editions, “Ruth, if she is aware of his words, gives no sign” (165; 653). This bodes poorly for Robert's plan to have Andrew to marry his widow.This overview is keyed to my interests, but it is not misrepresentative, just likely to seem unfamiliar. For example: given the second edition's habit of assigning hints of O'Neill only to Robert (tuberculosis, bookishness, a loathing of “quackery”), one may be surprised to find the first-edition Ruth recalling the playwright in her assumption of responsibility for her mother's invalidism. O'Neill knew the weight of this burden. Black observes that upon learning about his mother's morphine addiction, coincident with his birth, O'Neill could not “escape the realization” that his father and brother “irrationally but consciously blamed him for causing his mother's addiction.”40 In this respect, Ruth more closely resembles Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night than Maud Steele in Bread and Butter or Mrs. Rowland in Before Breakfast, to both of whom she has been linked—or Eve, the deathless bugaboo of sexually anxious critics.41 The biographical specificity of the second edition is further diffused when O'Neill first raises, then dismisses, the possibility that Robert might write for a local newspaper. Finding O'Neill in the first edition is tricky; unlike Fog and other early efforts, the text is not driven by the need for self-validation.The differences are not always so obvious. The alteration of character between the editions is usually a matter of emphasis or degree, tending in the second edition to the play's betterment. But the sheer abundance of information about characters in the first edition provides backstory that O'Neill was not yet skilled enough to convey economically. Before the cuts, Andrew Mayo and Mrs. Atkins risked becoming the stereotypical galoot and shrew. Their early iterations, nonetheless, help explain Ruth's state of mind by emphasizing two causes of the depression that the later text will mistake for petulance. Andrew's cruelty salts his cluelessness in the second edition but overwhelms it in the first, where the insult-then-apologize rhythm of his scenes with Ruth is unmistakable, more reminiscent of Robert and more obviously destructive to Ruth. Mrs. Atkins is awful in the second edition but outrageously so in the first, where O'Neill accents her talent for niggling fomentation by giving her more lines of her own and greater prominence in Ruth's. The lack of restraint in O'Neill's initial versions of these characters hammers home their deleterious effect on Ruth, thereby legitimating her suffering.Robert himself is the principal element in the first edition's relatively indulgent portrayal of Ruth. There he lacks the tragic grandeur that many critics have found in his familiar rendering. Never awash in testosterone or vim, the first Robert is defined by his status as sickly, feminine, and sexually pallid, not by his introversion and his defenselessness against the “fate” that Ruth is often taken to embody.42 Robert's illness is particularized in the first edition, at cost to the lyricism that O'Neill sought for the character but at benefit to our understanding of the innateness of the condition for which O'Neill and his collaborators, like Andrew, would later hold Ruth responsible. In both editions, the pulmonologist tells Andrew, “My examination revealed that both of his lungs are terribly affected” (146; 643). The first edition continues, representing Robert's death as necessitated by the passage of time or even the condition of motility: “A hemorrhage, resulting from any exertion or merely through the unaided progress of the disease itself, will undoubtedly prove fatal” (146). His defenestrative voyage into and out of a nearby ditch, Robert says, causes the “bad hemorrhage” that he knows will kill him (162).O'Neill's reliance on crude detail exculpates Ruth by pairing the wobbly tenor called “dream” with a concrete vehicle (“lungs … terribly affected”; “hemorrhage,” twice). This metaphor dominates the first edition: the dream is the disease and the dream/disease kills Robert. Robert's final speech validates the metaphor. Unlike, for example, Zola's Nana, Ruth has no place in the meta