Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Long Journey of Exorcism

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

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.1.0051

2161-4318

William Davies King,

Theatre and Performance Studies

In the unfolding story of Exorcism's rediscovery, various stories have been told about the role of Agnes Boulton in the transmission of the manuscript. It has been said that she held on to a copy of this play that O'Neill wanted destroyed, then defied his wish to have his manuscripts turned over to him at the divorce, as if she knew that one day the world would hungrily receive the lost play. More likely, I think, is the following scenario.Though O'Neill wanted the playscript to be taken out of circulation and therefore destroyed duplicate copies, he retained the original for himself—as what writer would not? Unlike Honor Among the Bradleys and The Trumpet, which he wrote around the same time and then destroyed, this play reflected on his personal and family history, and eradicating it completely might have seemed a little like a suicide in itself. Besides, he was aware of his growing pile of manuscripts as an archive for his own self-study and also as a set of potentially valuable items to be sold. Boulton, too, was a keeper of her own manuscripts (also letters, receipts, tickets, and much else), and eventually it became clear she was a true hoarder.At the point when his marriage to Boulton was breaking up, in December 1927, O'Neill wrote to her from New York, asking that she send up from their Bermuda house all of his manuscripts. He claimed that a dealer, A.S.W. Rosenbach, was interested in brokering their sale but needed to inspect them first. On December 2 he insisted on her boxing up everything for immediate delivery. By December 17 he was in a panic because the boxes had not arrived. Then, on December 19 he cabled that the first box had arrived, and on December 20 he says he expects another box on the next boat. On or about December 26 he wrote her a long letter, at last announcing his wish for a divorce.1 He makes no mention of the other box of scripts, so one can assume that what he was expecting had arrived. It seems likely that he delayed the divorce declaration until he had the scripts in hand.Whatever was contained in those boxes did not include everything he wanted, though the fact that Yale and Princeton now hold many of his early manuscripts, which came directly from the author, shows that a lot did come through. That spring, in conjunction with early negotiations over the divorce, O'Neill had his attorney and friend Harry Weinberger travel to Bermuda. A secondary purpose was to obtain more of his papers—“an attempt in which he was only partly successful,” say the Gelbs.2 On September 30, 1928, O'Neill wrote to Weinberger, specifically concerned about three years of diaries he claims she kept at Spithead. (In fact, one diary, the so-called Scribbling Diary for 1925, was kept by her and was sold to the Beinecke Library after Boulton's death.) No mention is made of missing scripts in that letter.3 He continues to express concern about “personal things” she retained as late as May 9, 1929, two months before the divorce was finalized.In fact, she did possess O'Neill playscripts, as became obvious when she sold a few manuscripts and/or corrected carbon copies to Harvard in the late 1950s, along with the nearly complete Boulton-O'Neill correspondence. The plays included Bread and Butter, Lazarus Laughed, Marco Millions, and Now I Ask You. The sale to Harvard was set up by Max Wylie, a writer who had approached Boulton as part of his research for a novel he was writing, a roman à clef about O'Neill, Boulton, and Carlotta Monterey, which was titled Trouble in the Flesh (1959). He recalled that Boulton had a pile of O'Neill papers in the corner of a bedroom in her house in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. The pile included the correspondence and these few manuscripts. He realized that she needed the money and helped arrange the sale to Harvard.4 The University of Virginia Library also bought for the C. Walter Barrett Collection some items from Boulton, including a typescript of Beyond the Horizon, two typescripts of Now I Ask You, and the manuscript of a play written by Boulton with O'Neill's corrections. Yale, too, acquired a manuscript in this sell-off, O'Neill's adaptation of Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner.The sale of these items greatly annoyed Donald Gallup, curator of the American Literature Collection at Yale, also Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, as she was the one who had been most responsible for bringing the O'Neill Collection to Yale. Gallup knew that the terms of the 1929 divorce settlement specified that Boulton should return all manuscripts. To his way of thinking, Boulton had sold items she did not properly own. However, no steps were taken to alter the outcome of the sales.5Still, the sum of all these items amounts to only a small fraction of O'Neill's total cache of manuscripts and very little that could be considered unique or “lost.” The way Wylie characterizes Boulton's possession of this material is that she did not know what she had, that it was all a jumble, that it blended in with a huge mass of miscellaneous papers. She told a New York Times interviewer in 1958: “Ever since I was a child, I've held on to every scrap of paper I owned.”6So, she held onto things, and obviously Exorcism was among them, but within that chaotic form of ownership known as hoarding. It took Max Wylie to make her see that cash value might be obtained for some of what she kept, and she did need the money. Quite likely, she was careless at the point when she boxed up O'Neill's manuscripts to send to him, also when Weinberger came by to cull out more material. Many who describe the condition of Spithead in the last year of the marriage report that it was messy, a jumble, hard to sort out. I believe she retained her correspondence with O'Neill for sentimental reasons, because she could find her Gene in those letters. Perhaps she had the 1925 “Scribbling Diary” in her possession because she had used it to take notes on his behavior when she was assisting in his treatment for alcoholism during that year and the year following. But the plays she kept were hardly among her favorites. Now I Ask You had, in some sense, become her play when she set out to revise it in 1920, but she did not get far with it. Beyond the Horizon had been dedicated to her, so perhaps she kept that typescript intentionally. But she actively disliked Marco Millions and probably Lazarus Laughed as well, and the others were stray items.7 Her ownership of these traces of O'Neill seems nonspecific, random, not a deliberate “withholding” (with the exceptions mentioned above), and that would include Exorcism, which probably meant little more to her than a corrected carbon of Lazarus Laughed until she got into a conversation with Yordan. Yordan's interest in O'Neill dates back at least to 1939, when he wrote the first version of Anna Lucasta, as a 400-page play, after reading “Anna Christie.”8 When he met Boulton, several years later, he might well have inquired about the connection of Agnes and Anna, also O'Neill and the barrooms of lower Manhattan, enough to trigger Boulton's memory of Exorcism.All of those scripts and other papers had come from Bermuda to West Point Pleasant in the 1930s, when Spithead was being rented to produce some income. The New Jersey house had been in the family since the 1890s, and she was living there, along with countless cats, when she died in 1968. However, from 1943 till about 1949, she was living in Los Angeles, in a trailer. Wartime housing was hard to find. It seems wildly unlikely she would have brought all her O'Neill materials to California with her, so it remains a question when and where she passed the Exorcism manuscript to Philip Yordan. As Jeff Kennedy's essay suggests (elsewhere in this journal), she likely came to know Yordan through Oona's friendship with Marilyn Nash and Charlie Chaplin's friendship with Yordan. This would seem to suggest that the Christmas gift was given in California. But in what year? How did the manuscript get to California? Did Boulton perhaps return to New York to see her new grandchild, Eugene O'Neill III, who was born to Shane O'Neill and his new wife, Catherine Givens, on November 16, 1945? Did she retrieve the manuscript then in order to give it to Yordan?9We will probably never know, but if so, there is a strange irony that this play about the rebirth of Eugene O'Neill might have come into its new life at the moment of another rebirth of Eugene O'Neill. Sadly, baby Eugene suffered a crib death the following February 10.10 O'Neill frequently remarked on the Greek sense of fatality in his thoughts about tragedy. Here, it could be said that Exorcism, a play that was born alongside the son (Shane) and that underwent a sort of crib death in 1920, when it was taken from the world, retraced those fateful steps in 1945, alongside the brief life of the son (Eugene III). If Yordan learned of the grief Boulton faced at the death of her first grandson, which seems likely, that might have been reason enough for him to bury the ghost-ridden gift deep in his file drawers forever. At the time of the baby's death, the father (Gene) could give no comfort or new lease on life to his son (Shane), as Edward Malloy could give Ned.11 It would take another buried manuscript to release just one of “the four haunted Tyrones” from his journey into night, and Shane would never entirely escape the curse. Fortunately, now, we have come to a time when Exorcism can be exorcised.