Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.36.1.0086
ISSN2161-4318
Autores ResumoRobert Dowling has been on a scholarly binge not seen among O'Neillians since the great centenary publications by Travis Bogard circa 1988, which included the three-volume Library of America edition of the plays. Even leaving aside Dowling's 2008 book, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, which includes O'Neill but does not showcase his life or work centrally, his output in the past five years has been, to say the least, impressive. Starting in 2009 with the authoritative and comprehensive Critical Companion to Eugene O'Neill, along with the 2011 collection, Eugene O'Neill and His Early Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives and the Avant Garde (edited with Eileen Herrmann) and the recently published trove of first-run criticism, Eugene O'Neill: The Contemporary Reviews (with Jackson R. Bryer), and now culminating with this major new major biography, Dowling has effectively updated and in certain respects redefined O'Neill for the current generation of students, scholars, theater professionals, and playgoers.In Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, Dowling creates a distinctive voice for himself among such other major biographers as Doris Alexander, Stephen Black, the Gelbs, and Louis Sheaffer. In contrast to the most recent full biography, Black's penetrating 1999 study, Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, with its focus on the plays as a process of “self-psychoanalysis,” Dowling offers a portrait of the artist as a man in the world, exploring O'Neill's complex affiliations with family, friends, spouses, colleagues, institutions, and movements. The playwright himself would have seen in this lively and empathetic biography a realization, in a phrase that Dowling quotes, of the “concise and interest-catching” story that he'd hoped for but did not find in the earliest book-length account of his life, Barrett H. Clark's 1926 Eugene O'Neill (316). Standing on the shoulders, inevitably, of the established giants among O'Neill biographers, Sheaffer and the Gelbs, and drawing on their research—especially the seemingly inexhaustible Sheaffer Collection at Connecticut College—Dowling nonetheless incorporates some important new primary sources and findings in staking out his place among them.In the introduction, Dowling accounts for his strong sense of connection to O'Neill with a bit of his own background. He grew up in the same Connecticut–New York terrain that shaped O'Neill's youth, and in his Irish-Catholic upbringing Irishness turned out to be the stronger element, as it did for O'Neill. Dowling credits an unnamed student in one of his O'Neill seminars with a remark that led to the subtitle and structure of this book: that O'Neill's own life is itself a great dramatic text, presumably one that biographers must continually revisit and reinterpret much as directors continually revisit classic plays. Though the basic narrative does not deviate significantly from the pattern established by the Gelbs and Sheaffer, Dowling has a knack for making O'Neill's world stand out in sharp relief with such telling details as this image of Provincetown Harbor in 1916, the year and place of the first stage production of an O'Neill play: “Slick with seagull droppings and cod guts and strewn with tangled nets … the briny fumes of the daily catch steamed up off the harbor's more than fifty wharves” (125). As if with an air of fond reminiscence, Dowling offers this on the food at the Golden Swan, or Hell Hole, the New York dive saloon that served as one model for the setting of The Iceman Cometh and other plays: “Food was ordered and retrieved through a jagged hole in the wall—the sandwich or bowl of spaghetti or stewed tomatoes you could get were all pretty good, considering the orifice they had come out of” (117). Biography is a special kind of dramatic art, and Dowling convincingly recreates the drama of O'Neill's life with both erudition and insight.To sustain this life-as-drama effect, Dowling avoids getting overly involved in literary analysis of the plays, focusing instead of the conditions of their creation and—fittingly, given the recent publication of the collection of critical reviews—their initial reception by theater critics. He offers one- or two-paragraph synopses of the plays to help situate readers who are new to O'Neill's body of work or perhaps familiar only with Long Day's Journey; in this sense the plot summaries serve as something like stage directions for the life drama, but they also help draw a clear line of demarcation between the life and the plays, a line that is not always fully acknowledged in biographical readings of O'Neill's work. Noting that “O'Neill was in no sense a natural-born genius” (16), Dowling sets himself the task of sorting out how O'Neill managed to attain genius in writing dramatic masterworks while also turning out more misfires or outright duds than most writers, especially winners of the Nobel Prize. He frames each part of this “Life in Four Acts” with a preface that establishes key cultural and theatrical circumstances, mimicking the elaborate, italicized set directions that O'Neill uses in his plays. This might sound like a conceit, almost a gimmick, but is actually effective in contextualizing both life and work, with particular attention to evolving conditions in the theater business. The four-act structure likewise avoids seeming contrived because Dowling's protagonist remains such a compelling presence throughout. However, squeezing O'Neill's last twenty-five years into the final act, starting with separation from his second wife Agnes Boulton, strains the design by covering so many crucial life changes and major artistic achievements that it's hard not to feel an asymmetry one does not sense in, say, the fourth act of Long Day's Journey.The reframing of O'Neill's drama in light of previously unpublished facts, photographs, and documents, along with a strategic use of unpublished memoirs by friends and associates not previously incorporated into biographies of O'Neill, fully justifies this new study. Notable among these are 1885 interviews of James O'Neill shortly after the death of infant son Edmund O'Neill, an event recast in Long Day's Journey as the Tyrone family's central trauma; an account by Dorothy Day of her brief affair but lingering friendship with O'Neill; and James Light's tantalizing “Parade of Masks” that, among other insights, casts further light on the novelistic instincts that O'Neill expressed in the form of innovative methods in drama while apparently flirting for a time with becoming a novelist. The photographs of the Hell Hole from around 1900 and Louise Bryant seated with O'Neill (holding a cat) in 1916 are significant additions to the published photographic record, though the latter picture deserves more than the stingy two-by-three-inch space allotted. Also of special value is Dowling's incorporation of interviews he conducted with the recently deceased Kaye Albertoni, O'Neill's private nurse during much of his two final decades and thus witness to much of the psychodrama of his tumultuous years with Carlotta in California and later in Massachusetts. In the book's final section, a “Postscript” examining Carlotta's release of Long Day's Journey just a few years after O'Neill's death and seemingly against the late playwright's wishes, Dowling assesses all the relevant players and circumstances while reaching this sensible and characteristic judgment: “Whatever her motives, the release of Long Day's Journey proved to be exactly the right thing to do” (485).The recently recovered typescript of the highly autobiographical Exorcism, the 1919 play about O'Neill's youthful suicide attempt, all copies of which he had sought to destroy, enables some of Dowling's fresh insights into the significance of O'Neill's first marriage to Kathleen Jenkins, mother of Eugene O'Neill Jr., and his sordid divorce from her in the summer of 1912, just before the time setting of Long Day's Journey. From the transcript of the divorce proceedings and judgment from the Westchester County Clerk's Office in New York and the idealized image of Kathleen as the still-faithful wife Margaret in Exorcism, Dowling infers O'Neill's lifelong respect for his first wife, which helps account for his suppression of Exorcism and the lack of any mention of a marriage, divorce, or baby son among the details of Edmund Tyrone's recent exploits in Long Day's Journey. Clearly, his second wife Agnes Boulton and third wife Carlotta Monterey played more direct roles in his mature private and professional life, but Dowling gives new emphasis to Kathleen Jenkins's enduring place in O'Neill's personal drama instead of relegating her to an anecdote of the playwright's youthful folly.Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts is a worthy successor to previous major biographies because Dowling has such a strong grasp of O'Neill's temperament and predilections and conveys a refreshingly demystified sense of his personal dealings that makes him seem a more companionable figure. Dowling is indebted to his predecessors for establishing the epic outlines of O'Neill's life story, and it's likely that even more revelations are in store when Barbara Gelb publishes the long-awaited second part of the biography cowritten with her late husband, Arthur Gelb, revised and expanded from their pathbreaking 1962 volume. Meanwhile, along with some important new findings, Dowling has given us an O'Neill very much of his own time as well as one for ours, avoiding some of the mythologizing tendencies of his predecessors typified by the brooding, gothicized portrait in Ric Burns's 2006 film portrait. Dowling sees the ghosts hovering about the four haunted Tyrones, but he also knows where the bodies are buried.
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