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Eugene O'Neill Remembered

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.39.1.0179

2161-4318

Kurt Eisen,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

The fifth volume in the American Writers Remembered series edited by Jackson Bryer, Eugene O'Neill Remembered joins the array of primary resources about O'Neill already available in book form—letters, interviews, and full-length memoirs. It gathers a wide range of personal accounts of the playwright into what volume editors Brenda Murphy and George Monteiro call, aptly, “a composite portrait, more cubist than realist” (2). Some of their sources will be familiar, especially to O'Neillians, such as Susan Glaspell's 1926 biography of Jig Cook, The Road to the Temple, which established the origin tale of O'Neill's 1916 emergence as a playwright on the shores of Provincetown, and a lengthier excerpt from Part of a Long Story, the 1958 memoir by O'Neill's second wife, Agnes Boulton. A culling of the rich archive of interviews at Connecticut College by biographer Louis Sheaffer supplies much of the book's content, but Murphy and Monteiro also track down reminiscences of O'Neill in numerous daily newspapers such as the New London Day, Providence Journal, and Hartford Courant, as well as unlikely periodicals as Outdoor America, with its whimsical profile of the great playwright as angler by his friend Harold De Polo. While readers will not find here a sharply etched portrait of the artist or a coherent narrative of his life, they will find a complex, often contradictory collage of O'Neill's temperament as an artist and his presence in the world.Like a standard biography, the book is organized chronologically. Its six sections begin with accounts from O'Neill's infancy through his early adulthood and forays into playwriting, followed by his early collaborations with the Provincetown Players and eventual Broadway eminence. It concludes with the period of his retreat from the New York stage in the mid-1930s, his brief return with The Iceman Cometh in 1946, and his final years of decline leading to his death in 1953. A brief chronology of O'Neill's life is placed at the beginning of the book as a kind of map to the journey that follows, and the book's sixty-two entries are numbered continuously across the sections. The editors also helpfully provide a bibliography of “additional reminiscences” they have chosen not to include but that might be of interest to scholars.The sheer range of these voices is one of the book's key strengths. Featured are such mandatory figures as Frederick P. Latimer, the hometown newspaper editor who recognized O'Neill's native literary talent, and critic George P. Nathan, O'Neill's longtime friend and supporter. Likewise, his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, makes a forceful entrance in the final two sections, while close friend and editor Saxe Commins provides a counternarrative to Carlotta's story of the tumultuous final years of the man she called “the Master.” In fact, all three of O'Neill's wives make an appearance, the briefest of them understandably being Kathleen Jenkins Pitt-Smith, whom O'Neill married in 1909 after he impregnated her (though they never lived together), represented here with notes from Sheaffer's 1962 interview with her.Several well-known figures whose careers only briefly linked to O'Neill's are heard, notably the poets Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, and actress Ingrid Bergman. Perhaps surprisingly, among the big names in the book several of his more significant collaborators are missing: Jig Cook, Robert Edmond Jones, Kenneth Macgowan, Philip Moeller, and James Light, for example, suggesting either that they didn't make the cut or that no worthy O'Neill reminiscences from them are extant. On the other hand, relatively unknown figures from his personal life offer vivid if not radically revisionist views of O'Neill's temperament, allowing the reader to see “Gene” the man as distinct from “O'Neill” the great American playwright.Extending the old adage that no man is a hero to his valet, the recollections of O'Neill's numerous medical caregivers take a mostly deromanticized view of their subject. The very first entry, from theater producer George C. Tyler, though not from a medical man establishes this thread in describing his part in fetching a doctor in the wee hours to the Chicago hotel room of O'Neill's parents, touring actor James O'Neill and his wife Ella. “When you've assisted at walking the floor with fifteen pounds of howling infant at four in the morning,” Tyler observes, “it's hard to come round to thinking of that howling infant as genius in the making” (10). Sallie Coughlin, O'Neill's nurse at Salem Hospital in 1951 after his dreadful accident outside his home in nearby Marblehead, Massachusetts, regarded him as self-pitying and went so far as to wheel him to a desk with pencil and paper and insist that he try writing, not believing that his apparent Parkinson's disease (a misdiagnosis) should keep him from resuming his work.The editors do not lead their witnesses, offering context in their informative notes while correcting facts as needed, noting, for example, that O'Neill's chronic tremor was not Parkinson's but actually a much less familiar affliction called cerebellar cortical atrophy (331 n. 28). They also don't challenge an overwrought, perhaps dubious tale from the Sheaffer papers by one Calvin Hoffman, a theater critic and press agent who had gained notoriety by promoting the theory that Shakespeare's plays were authored by Christopher Marlowe. Hoffman recalls an evening in 1928 when as a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old he met O'Neill, his “writing-god,” after presenting himself at the great man's hotel-room door (133). Perhaps Hoffman's story is mostly true, but he undercuts its wonderstruck charm by concluding it with the sour note of his later revaluation of O'Neill's talent as “puny and puerile” and bemoaning “the insidious O'Neill infection” that had overtaken those less discerning than himself (139). Understandably, Sheaffer omitted this anecdote from his authoritative biography.Murphy and Monteiro also select recollections that conflict with each other on certain notable points, such as O'Neill's aversion to cutting his plays for performance, and whether his personal temperament actually inclined toward fellowship and humor despite his brooding visage and general reclusiveness. Nathan states flatly in a 1932 notebook entry, “In all the many years of our friendship, I have heard Eugene O'Neill laugh aloud once and only once” (187), while Irish playwright Sean O'Casey, whom O'Neill met and befriended in 1934, insists that while “with him a number times in the company of his dear friend, George Jean Nathan,” O'Casey would frequently see “the somber face of the Dramatist break into the sunniness of deep and generous laughter” (219). Such is the interplay of these recollections that they make their subject appear alternately impenetrable and aloof, then companionable and down to earth.The final section is dominated by conflicts between Carlotta and O'Neill's most loyal friends, especially Saxe Commins and Russel Crouse, along with publisher Bennett Cerf, almost eclipsing O'Neill in their battle over his well-being and legacy. The fate of the closely guarded Long Day's Journey Into Night manuscript was a special point of contention, with Commins and Cerf insisting that its release being delayed twenty-five years, based on their understanding of O'Neill's own wishes prior to his death in 1953. Convinced of her late husband's true intentions, Carlotta proceeded with its publication and stage production in 1956 on her authority as his sole beneficiary and executrix. Interspersing Carlotta's testimonial with those of Cerf and Commins, the editors leave readers to draw their own conclusions about who most truly served O'Neill's legacy in this battle.Murphy and Monteiro conclude their volume with a 1956 letter from Carl Van Vechten, patron of the Harlem Renaissance and frequent photographer of O'Neill, to publisher Alfred A. Knopf, in which he muses that “it would be impossible for anyone, save in some secret way, to set down his share of the story, to write a frank O'Neill story” (305). Van Vechten also hypothesizes that getting a true tale of O'Neill in print would be “an expensive procedure, because most of the witnesses would require a ghost writer.” In any case, he asks, is O'Neill really “worth all this trouble?” (305). An invaluable addition to the already rich biographical record, as well as a handy compendium of unpublished and previously published material, this volume demonstrates that by letting the witnesses speak for the themselves, the answer to Van Vechten's question must be a strongly affirmative “yes.”