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A Letter from Eugene O'Neill to Patrick McCartan (June 11, 1934); or, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and Days Without End (April 16, 1934)

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.43.1.0001

2161-4318

Christopher Murray,

Theatre and Performance Studies

It is freely conceded nowadays that O'Neill's Days Without End was a major flop on Broadway, has never been revived there, and is at present languishing outside the O'Neill canon. The purpose of this article is not to change all that but to show that a little-known production in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in April 1934 was so carefully and respectfully done and so warmly received, that a little more room in theater history must be allowed for this abandoned “Modern Miracle Play,” O'Neill's subtitle, which he stood by, though waveringly when it came to publication.1I begin with the man who made the Abbey production possible,Dr. Patrick McCartan (1878–1963), an Irish American political activist who, having met W. B. Yeats on one of the latter's American tours, befriended him and afterwards got involved in Yeats's project to found an Academy of Irish Literature to combat censorship and raise the profile of Irish-born authors.2 McCartan was a great help to Yeats in fundraising in America for this cause and it would have been he who recommended an invitation to O'Neill in 1932 to join the Academy. O'Neill was delighted to accept. On November 11, 1932, he wrote to his son, Eugene Jr.: Of course, I'm “associate” because not Irish born. But this I regard as an honor, whereas other Academies don't mean much to me. Anything with Yeats, Shaw, A.E., O'Casey, Flaherty, Robinson in it is good enough for me. Joyce refused to join…. Still & all I think little Ireland will have an Academy that will compare favorably with any country's. At any rate, I'm pleased about all this.3 Later, having seen and greatly admired Days Without End in its premiere by the Theatre Guild in January 1934, McCartan thought it would suit the Abbey Theatre. With that end in mind, he sent Yeats a copy of the play, just published by Random House, and recommended an Abbey production. Yeats, a busy man and still CEO of the Abbey, which he had co-founded in 1904, read it and admired it. It went into his library, which was acquired by the National Library of Ireland. It was there I discovered it in its pristine condition: no marginalia, no changes.4On February 16, 1934, Yeats wrote to McCartan: You did us a great service by recommending Eugene O'Neill's new play and by sending me a copy, it is not yet published in England. We [the Abbey] cabled O'Neill for permission to play it and have had a friendly reply and will produce it shortly after Easter. The parts are now being typed out from the book you sent. It is a most powerful play, and as you say, Catholic in atmosphere. Thanks too for the photograph of O'Neill which I hope the press may be able to use.5 The “Catholic” dimension of O'Neill's play would have been something to arouse Yeats's irony; he was facing big trouble at the Abbey as Éamon de Valera's new party swept into power. Yeats was affiliated with Cumann na Gael, the ruling party from 1922 to 1931, and had served in the Senate until 1928, occasionally taking a strong stand for the rights of Protestants.6 He felt sure de Valera would interfere in the running of the Abbey. The story here, then, is of a brilliant Irish go-between, Dr. Patrick McCartan, whose energy was so unflagging that he could push a Nobel laureate into staging a play he would otherwise never have heard of or might regard as not in his line.In the new Free State, the majority population was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. De Valera had plans for a new constitution, introduced in 1937, which would give prominent recognition to the Catholic Church and usher in a clerical state.7 A play such as Days Without End, with its scrupulous angst over faith and morals, was bound to attract interest in Dublin. Yeats would have had mixed feelings at the timing, yet he welcomed McCartan's enthusiasm. A play such as O'Casey's The Silver Tassie, rejected by Yeats for the Abbey in 1928 but accepted in 1935, had annoyed the priests and the ultra-devout and caused the sole Catholic on the Abbey board, novelist Brinsley McNamara, to resign in protest. That was just the sort of ignorance Yeats stood in fear of as Ireland gradually moved toward a theocracy. The production was a personal gamble for him as opponent. But, as the reviews show, O'Neill's vision, while complex in its mix of modernism and conservatism, triumphed. Yeats was not to know that on the other side of the Atlantic O'Neill had written to the business manager of Theatre Guild on February 18, 1934, when Days Without End was pulled, of his conviction that “idiot” reviews had “killed whatever chance there might have been” for its Broadway success. This play was important to him. “If ever there was an art for art's sake labor, it was mine in Days Without End.”8 In Dublin it was taken seriously in that light. Director and cast put their hearts and souls into it.Days Without End opened on April 16, 1934, to a packed house and remained packed for two weeks before, as was customary, it was replaced in the repertory system. Together for over ten years, the cast possibly represented the best ensemble the Abbey had in its history. It included the greatF. J. McCormick (1890–1947), whose range was very broad—one week Oedipus, the next perhaps O'Casey's Joxer. He even tackled King Lear in 1928, directed by the playwright Denis Johnston. The Abbey style was naturalistic, although all had the ability to work in poetic drama, and many of the cast in Days Without End would have played in Yeats's experimental plays as well as the standard realism. O'Neill himself saw the Irish Players, as they were called on tour, in New York in 1911 before he ever wrote plays,9 and now his play benefited from the traditional restraint of the Abbey style, which he admired. Besides McCormick there were Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields, soon to be Hollywood bound, and Eileen Crowe, McCormick's wife, who had often teamed with him; also Shelah Richards, a strong young actor, and the older stalwarts P. J. Carolan, May Craig, and Michael J. Dolan, character actors weaned on O'Casey.The Abbey Theatre in 1934 was much as at its inception in 1904. (The theater would be destroyed by fire in 1951 and not rebuilt on the site until 1966.) It was a small space with a small stage. Lennox Robinson, who besides being a director and a playwright also wrote a history of the Abbey, tells us the proscenium opening was a mere twenty-one feet, the curtain line to back-wall sixteen feet and four inches, and the width of the stage from wall to wall forty feet. The capacity of the theater was 536.10 It was an elegant little theater, with an elliptical balcony running right around, stalls, and a pit area. There was even a space in front of the stage for a small orchestra with a full-time conductor. Sight lines were not perfect, but the acoustic was, by report, good. All in all, O'Neill, having experienced the Provincetown Playhouse, would likely have been charmed by the Abbey.Yeats handed over O'Neill's text to the director Lennox Robinson, a theater man to his fingertips: playwright, director, member of the Abbey board, and author. He had already directed The Emperor Jones at the Abbey in January 1927. His biographer comments: The innovations in Ever the Twain [the Abbey Theatre, October 8, 1929], written shortly after Robinson's return from his lecture tour in the United States in 1928, disclose his indebtedness to Eugene O'Neill…. Robinson later paid tribute to O'Neill when he proposed him as one of the associates of the Irish Academy of Letters.11 Robinson's work rate was phenomenal. In the year when Days Without End was staged, he directed eight other new plays, two of them his own, at the Abbey. I have been able to discover no notes Robinson may have made in directing Days Without End, but it is clear from the two surviving playscripts, accurately and professionally typed from the Random House text, which McCartan had sent to Yeats and with which I have compared them, that very few changes were made. Historically, there was no legal censorship in Irish theater, strange to say, although the English laws nominally applied prior to Irish independence in 1921.12 Accordingly, no cuts were made in the risqué scene in act 2 where Elsa and Lucy speak freely of sex and divorce. There is a cut in one of the two scripts, and since it involves F. J. McCormick's lines this script may have been his copy.13 This passage follows John's line to Father Baird, “I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice.” The cut continues until on the next page John says, “We need, above all, to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility in ourselves!” It is a tirade against American greed and loss of soul: pure O'Neill, one might say. McCormick may have felt all of this was irrelevant. I don't know. He was with the Abbey Theatre Irish Players who toured America in 1932: he would have seen first-hand the effects of the Great Depression, which is in part what the speech uses as a stick to beat the citizenship with.14 There is no cut in the other surviving script, now in the Abbey archive, which strikes me as more for stage manager than actor, with marginal cues and warnings. Robinson may thus have given way to McCormick.Otherwise, changes in the scripts are minor. For example, in act 3, scene 2, Dr. Stillwell's line, “I want to talk to you about your wife's condition,” the possessive and the final word are cut, possibly because they conveyed the idea of pregnancy. On the other hand, in the Abbey archive script a marginal entry in ink inserts a cue, “sits chair L” for Stillwell, justified by the stage direction a few lines later, “He abruptly gets to his feet,” as represented in the Random House text (139). The actor in this role, Barry Fitzgerald, would have been alert to this authorial slip.The final scene deserves a brief comment here. O'Neill's stage directions for the church interior are very detailed; they were not fully carried through at the Abbey. The Abbey designer, Dorothy Travers-Smith, by this time had much experience with the Dublin Drama League, established by Yeats and Travers-Smith's husband, Lennox Robinson, in 1918 to bring non-Irish drama into the Abbey on Sunday and Monday nights.15 With few resources the League managed to stage an impressive array of modern European plays, as well as some O'Neill before the Gate stole their thunder in 1928 with The Hairy Ape. The Abbey archive reveals that Travers-Smith created a simpler church scene than O'Neill envisaged for act 4, scene 2, with no colors, not even for the dawn light coming through the stained glass. Neither, among the props, is there any mention of a huge cross, such as O'Neill was proud to have created in New York, just a plain crucifix. One Dublin reviewer remarked: “The solemnity of the setting of the final act was not helped by the jazz design of the stain glass windows.”16Before moving on to the reviews, there are two other points regarding the staging. On the verso of the final page of the NLI script, there are unexplained details that I take to record interval times of ten minutes, twelve minutes, ten minutes, and five minutes, making a total of thirty-seven minutes. For a four-act play this was probably acceptable, although a Dublin wag complained that the play's title should be altered to Intervals Without End.A break before the last scene, of course, is a reckless piece of dramaturgy.17 The other point relates to the mask worn by Arthur Shields as Loving.It seems appropriate that an O'Neill play staged in what we may term Yeats's theater should make artistic use of a mask. This is something the two playwrights had in common. O'Neill took his cue from the Greeks, Yeats from the Japanese.18 Both were influenced by the English director and scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966). For O'Neill the mask was a psychological device, a means of dramatizing a Freudian concept of the self and of neurosis; for Yeats the self and anti-self, terms used in “Anima Hominis” in his Mythologies (1959), were a way into an epistemological understanding of identity as a dramatic struggle for unity of being. O'Neill was much more interested in social and sociological issues than the poet Yeats, who was pledged to Celtic myth as a mask for nationalist themes. What Denis Donoghue professed over fifty years ago remains true: “Here [in A Full Moon in March (1935)] and in practically every page of his work Yeats is concerned with one of the most radical problems of the present century, the disintegration of personality.”19I believe O'Neill was obsessed with the same problem. Almost the last line in the blazing act 3, scene 2 of Days Without End is (from Loving): “I tell you there is nothing—nothing!” which at this point John translates as “nothing to fear!” One thinks of the title of Yeats's worst play, the five-act prose Where There Is Nothing (1903), written under the influence of Nietzsche. It premiered at the Royal Court in London on June 20, 1904, and then was heard of no more; with the help of Lady Gregory, Yeats rewrote it in three acts as The Unicorn from the Stars (staged at the Abbey November 21, 1907). There is one line that makes me believe O'Neill might have known the play, when the hero Paul Ruttledge says: “We must destroy the World; we must destroy everything that has Law and Number, for where there is nothing, there is God.”20 I see O'Neill's final scene as carrying through from that line. It just needs an exclamation mark.All three reviewers for the Dublin press saw the production as “important.” The Irish Times thought the Abbey Theatre “must be congratulated on securing the first European production of Eugene O'Neill's ‘Days Without End.’ Mr. O'Neill is still America's leading dramatist, and a new play by him is a matter of some importance.” This unnamed reviewer, demonstrably Andrew E. Malone (1888–1939), saw Days Without End as showing that O'Neill had turned full circle, returning “almost to the simplicity of his early one-act plays; and, after many intellectual adventures, he has come back to complete religious orthodoxy.” A good analysis of the play follows: Ethically, Mr. O'Neill's conclusion is quite satisfying, but logically his argument (or rather John Loving's argument) is difficult to follow. The initial revolt was on intellectual grounds, and the return should be on those grounds also, but is not…. We are left without any really satisfactory explanation of John's conversion.21 Malone concedes, however, that O'Neill “has lost none of his sense of the stage, and the last three scenes are all highly dramatic.” In this context Malone admires the use of the mask “to portray both sides of the man's nature, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ sides, speaking in their proper persons as occasion demands.” Nevertheless, he feels that the masked Loving “intrudes into a perfectly naturalistic play, where he appears not only out of place, but even comic.”22 Malone didn't get it.Another Dublin review of Days Without End appeared in the Irish Independent, a conservative rival to de Valera's nationalist Irish Press. It was initialed D. S., for David Sears (1900–1951), member of a prominent journalist family, author of two plays staged by the Gate Theatre—Juggernaut (1929) and The Dead Ride Fast (1931)—and drama critic. He began his review much as the other Dublin reviewers: “‘Days Without End’ is an important play. I use the adjective advisedly, and the Abbey deserves our warmest congratulations for securing for us the first production of it in Europe and for the manner in which it was played and produced [i.e. directed].” He allows that the play “requires an intelligent audience” and the Abbey's was “beyond reproach.” While O'Neill is “a past master of the naturalist school … his experiments are worthy of careful consideration.” In Days Without End, “to stress the struggle between good and evil, faith and unbelief, sentiment and cynicism, in the soul of his hero, [O'Neill] has resorted to the device of a dual personality. We see two John Lovings on the stage, two opposite facets of the same personality.” Sears found this “a clumsy but an effective device” and just wondered why O'Neill did not use soliloquy.23Sears saw Days Without End as a morality play, the drawback to which was that “artistry must at the end give way to didacticism with its inevitable saccharine flavour.” Consequently, while Sears admired the dramaturgy and found the psychology “superb,” he found the last act an artistic failure, “because while it may be psychologically true and convincing it is not psychologically inevitable, as it should be.” (This is much the same point made by the Irish Times reviewer.) Sears conceded, however, that the play “grips the attention because of its almost uncomfortable insight into the queer repellent impulses that can lurk in the mind of a rather ordinary man.”24Sears admired the duo F. J. McCormick and Arthur Shields in the roles of the Lovings because “they had to simultaneously preserve their separate entities and blend into the same personality.” They made no attempt to speak with the same intonation, but they were dressed alike, and Shields, as the “Second Self, wore a beautifully made mask of his colleague's face made by Mr. George Atkinson.” McCormick's performance focused on John's humanity, given “with that rare intellectual insight which has made him famous,” while Shields “suggested a vehement astral presence” and “a slight eerie touch with masterly economy.”25 Eileen Crowe as Elsa gave us a couple of minutes' acting in Scene One of Act Three as dazzling in its perfection as a flawless gem. It was the moment when Loving unconsciously betrayed his guilt. McCormick was speaking, but every eye in the house was staring at Eileen Crowe, reading the more vividly told story in the expression of her face.26 A reviewer unnamed but identifiable as Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958), playwright and drama critic for the Irish Press, a new newspaper founded in 1931 by Éamon de Valera for political reasons, certainly “got” O'Neill's intentions. She opened with news of a full house: “As usual, the playwright has found an ingenious plot and in this case has constructed around it a Christian drama of great force and of fine quality. It is the struggle of a man who has losthis Faith.” She traces John's alienation following the death of his parents: “When he came of age he passed, in spiritual unrest, from one philosophy to another…. Then he fell in love and for a time he found happiness” (an uncanny anticipation of Mary Tyrone's line in Long Day's Journey Into Night). Macardle provides a good synopsis: On account of his unbelief he became obsessed with the fear of his wife's death and the destruction of all that life had come to mean to him. Unbalanced by this fear, he yielded to his grosser nature. This raised to him an insurmountable barrier between his wife and himself, and to explain to her, he invented the plot of a novel which was the story of his own life. His uncle [Father Baird] had a premonition that he was in spiritual danger and comes to him, being present at the recital of the crisis in the plot of the proposed novel, which is in thin disguise his own crisis. His wife is also present … and recognizes that the fictions of the novel are facts. In the last act the struggle in his own soul is resolved…. The device of the masked figure seems through the greater portion of the play hardly essential, but the intense realism it gave to the final scene justified it.27 On the following day, in a signed piece, Macardle enlarged on her theme. This contribution is accompanied by a photograph (in dress rehearsal) of a crucial moment in 3.2. in Days Without End, when Elsa returns from her walk wringing wet and feverish. She sits on a chair, while John shows concern, and the masked Loving shows his “sinister intentness.”28From her opening sentence, “Ireland and America combined to make Eugene O'Neill,” Macardle moves to his parents who gave him the middle name “Gladstone” and simultaneously gave him that sense of life's natural impulses, that closeness to the heart of its mystery, which pervades his plays…. O'Neill's American countrymen do not always understand their own troubles and impulses. He, with Irish clear-sightedness, understands. He sees into them and beyond them; realizes what these men and women have come from; what they may become.29 Following a paragraph broadly illustrating O'Neill's originality as playwright, from The Emperor Jones to Marco Millions, Macardle comes to her main point: Throughout his work, varied as are his types, plots and settings, a single realization pervades his thoughts: the apprehension of the dual nature of man…. Psychologists were studying this aspect of human nature, analysing the relations between man's reasoning self and the lower tendencies that are the enemies of his peace. The dramatist began to examine this conflict more consciously. In Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill studies women of a neurasthenic, self-tormented and rather repellent type, [and] shows them lost in the waste of their own barren passions, drowning in misery and despair.30 Referring to Strange Interlude and The Great God Brown (as yet unseen in Dublin), Macardle asserts: These technical experiments, together with his life-long preoccupation with the theme of the dual nature of man, come to a focus in Days Without End. The loose threads of his thought are gathered into a pattern, his apprehension of the lower ego [i.e., id] is given concrete embodiment, a conflict is resolved and a question answered in this strange and original play.31 This ends a worthy account of O'Neill's Irish American genius. It may be noted that Macardle anticipated O'Neill's letter to John Mason Brown seven months later, saying that for him, “absorption in the dualism of man's mortal soul” was central to his work.32All three reviewers observed O'Neill's concept of the divided self, which is a crucial feature of the Celtic personality. Thirty years later, in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Brian Friel has two actors playing Gar O'Donnell, the young man on the brink of exile to America. The two Gars, Friel writes, “are two views of the one man…. private gar is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id.”33 Robert Hogan is the only theater historian to link Friel's play back to Days Without End.34 But Yeats's own work is full of self-division, and his concept of the mask describes it also: for example, in The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), revised as Fighting the Waves (Abbey, 1929).Yeats was away when Days Without End opened at the Abbey. It emerges that he was in London, having the Steinach operation he believed would renew his vital energies.35 McCartan was not let into that secret. But Yeats's wife, George, went to the Abbey and let Yeats know that the play was a “Great success” with “magnificent acting, [and] good production.”36 On his return to Dublin, Yeats persuaded the Irish Academy of Letters to invite O'Neill to visit Ireland. The invitation was directed through McCartan, and this explains the awkwardness of O'Neill's reply, a gracious decline on the basis of poor health (see fig. 4, below). It seems rather a pity, for he would have been sure of a rapturous welcome from the theater people of Dublin and beyond. Days Without End was revived on August 13, 1934, for one week, a lap of honor for the absent O'Neill.