Eugene O'Neill Remembered

By Brenda Murphy and George Monteiro

Eugene O’Neill Remembered offers new views into the playwright’s life by capturing the direct memories of those who were close to him through interviews, memoirs, and other recollections. These sixty-two remembrances create an unprecedented image of O’Neill.

Known principally as the author of some of the most significant plays in the American dramatic canon and as one of America’s Nobel Laureates in literature, O'Neill rarely gave interviews and offered few details about himself. As a consequence, his life has long been shrouded in myth. He also abetted some of the misconceptions about his youth by, for example, advocating the story that he was expelled from Princeton for throwing a rock through Woodrow Wilson's window or by exaggerating the amount of time he had spent at sea. The legend of the hard-drinking, tormented playwright with a grim view of life was further reinforced when Long Day's Journey into Night was produced in 1956, three years after his death instead of the twenty-five years he had insisted on.
 
The portrayal of O’Neill as a tragic figure has been solidified in a number of biographies. The purpose of this collection, however, is to present O'Neill as others saw him and described him in their first-person accounts. In the course of these reminiscences, many of the vast and various narrators conflict with and contradict each other. Unlike other accounts of O’Neill’s life, much of the focus is on impressions instead of facts. The result is a revealing composite portrait of a key figure in twentieth-century American literary history.
 
This extensive collection offers insights unavailable in any other book and will hold massive appeal for scholars and students interested in American literature, Eugene O’Neill, and theater history, as well as anyone keen to uncover intimate details of the life of one of America’s greatest writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9780817390648

Book preview

notes.

I

New London, School, and Wandering (1888–1913)

Eugene O’Neill was born in a hotel in New York, the city where his father James O’Neill, a well-known actor-manager, was performing. As a small child, Eugene was often brought along on tour with his father’s company. The first reminiscences record O’Neill’s early life in the theater and in New London, Connecticut, where the family had established the only permanent home they ever had, a summer cottage that James named Monte Cristo, after his most famous and most lucrative role. Eugene’s mother, Ella, became addicted to morphine as a result of complications after his birth, and he was sent to boarding school at the age of seven, attending several schools before he enrolled at Princeton University in 1906. He left Princeton at the end of his freshman year, suspended because of poor grades and poor attendance, and never returned. After working briefly at a job obtained for him by his father, he lived in New York on a small allowance, drinking heavily. In 1909 he married Kathleen Jenkins, who had become pregnant. Disapproving of the match, his father got a job for him on a prospecting expedition in Honduras that was being subsidized by a mining-stock company in which he had invested. O’Neill contracted malaria and returned to the United States. After working briefly for his father’s touring company, he went to sea for a few months and then began living in a flophouse in New York. Kathleen bore a son and named him Eugene O’Neill Jr. O’Neill visited him as an infant only once (though they reconnected when the boy was eleven). He and Kathleen divorced, and, after attempting suicide, he went to live in New London, where his father got him a position on a local newspaper, the New London Telegraph, to which he contributed verse as well as news. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1912, he went first to the state sanatorium in Shelton, Connecticut, and then to Gaylord Farm, a private sanatorium in Wallingford, where his disease was arrested, and he began writing plays.

In the selections included from this early period of his life, Eugene O’Neill is remembered by George Tyler as a baby, by William Lee as a very bad young actor, and by Warren Hastings and Richard Weeks as an enthusiastic drinker and indifferent Princeton student; Pierre Loving describes him as a barroom critic; Frederick Latimer, Art McGinley, and Robert Woodworth remember him as a rather clueless cub reporter, and Clayton Hamilton as an ambitious young writer. Mabel Haynes recalls what it was like to be called as a nurse to the New London house during Ella’s addiction, and Irvin Cobb remembers James O’Neill’s pride in his young son’s early writing.

1

George C. Tyler

George C. Tyler (1868–1946) was a very active Broadway producer from 1902 until 1935. Among his producing credits were popular comedies such as Dulcy (1921) and Merton of the Movies (1922) by George S. Kaufman (1889–1961) and Marc Connolly (1890–1980), as well as serious plays like The Plough and the Stars (1927) by Sean O’Casey (1880–1964), and revivals of Macbeth (1928) and Magda (1902). His 1920 production of O’Neill’s Chris Christophersen, retitled Chris, which was intended for Broadway, closed out of town in Philadelphia before it reached New York. He did produce O’Neill’s The Straw at the Greenwich Village Theatre in 1921.

Source: George C. Tyler in collaboration with J. C. Furnas, Whatever Goes Up (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1934), 90–92.

In connection with tricks I’ve missed, it’s funny now to look back and think of the bright way I behaved when James O’Neill used to bring me round plays that his young son Gene had written and ask me to tell him what I thought of them. That was years later when I was sitting on top of the world considering George Bernard Shaw a promising newcomer. O’Neill and I were very close friends, of course, but I didn’t see any particular reason to suppose that Gene should be taken seriously. I figured it was just run-of-mine paternal pride that made his father bring me these scripts of his. So I’d take them in and forget about them for a while—maybe read a little, but I wouldn’t take oath I did that often, and I’m certain that I can’t remember at all what they were like—and then I’d give them back to his father with the customary polite remarks about how Gene undoubtedly showed signs of talent, and deserved encouragement, but needed more development and had better wait a while. He seems to have got plenty of development since then, all right.

After all, though, I was still thinking of Gene as the baby in arms who traveled with Mrs. O’Neill when she’d be sent on ahead of the company to rest from the hardships of one-night stands, and I’d scramble round and do things for her and see she was comfortable, like the polite young man I was. One night in Chicago I was routed out of bed by a hurry-call from Mrs. O’Neill—Gene was dying, it seemed, and something had to be done about it at once. So I got into some clothes and went in and had a look at him—he was sort of black in the face and gasping and raising Cain—he looked to me like a pretty sick baby all right. I went hotfoot for the house-doctor. And of course he was out. There was nothing for it but to dive out into one of those fine, cold, windy nights they have in Chicago—I was wearing nothing much but a pair of pants and an overcoat—and dig up a doctor. When I found one, he huddled on a similar costume and we came galloping back to the hotel like the last act of an old melodrama—and then it turned out that the baby only had a routine case of colic. So you can understand that I did have some excuse for not taking Gene’s playwriting as seriously as I might have. When you’ve assisted at walking the floor with fifteen pounds of howling infant at four in the morning, it’s hard to come round to thinking of that howling infant as genius in the making.

2

Warren H. Hastings and Richard F. Weeks

Warren H. Hastings (1888–?) spent his career working for the advertising agency Folkard and Lawrence, representing British mills in the woolen industry. He retired to Princeton, where he wrote the following piece with Richard F. Weeks (1888–1971), who was retired and living in California after a career of practicing customs law in New York. They were friends and classmates of Eugene O’Neill’s during their freshman year at Princeton, the academic year of 1906–1907. They published their account of his college year in the hope that it would clarify the many inaccuracies or wrong impressions that had appeared in previous accounts of O’Neill’s year at Princeton.

Source: Warren H. Hastings and Richard F. Weeks, Episodes of Eugene O’Neill’s Undergraduate Days at Princeton, Princeton University Library Chronicle 29 (Spring 1968): 208–15.

Eugene O’Neill never had much to say about his family. He assumed we knew that his father was James O’Neill, the famous actor who played the Count in The Count of Monte-Cristo for many years. He did mention his mother as being an accomplished pianist and an elder brother Jamie, for whom he had a regard which reflected extreme admiration.

He was then barely eighteen years of age, tall, slender, broad-shouldered, but flat-chested and somewhat tubercular in appearance. He had long arms which he used to gesture dramatically and large hands with artistic fingers which he may have inherited from his mother. His theatrical gestures and oratorical discourses, no doubt, came to him from his father. One might describe him as handsome—certainly striking in mien—black hair; high, broad forehead and dark brown eyes, keen and inquisitive; finely chiseled nose. His otherwise attractive features were detracted from by an angular chin with a very thick lower lip and a cruel sensuous mouth drooping at the corners, conveying the sense of inward cynicism.

He was slow of speech unless animated by his subject. He spoke well in a modulated, low-toned voice, somewhat hesitatingly. He was shy, self-conscious; he often smiled, but was a bit sardonic and cynical. He was sarcastic and often foul-mouthed. Sometimes he became blasphemous, defying God and standing on a chair theatrically proclaiming with outstretched arms, If there be a God, let Him strike me dead! His classmates shuddered at the shock of such a diatribe, yet they realized that it was only for dramatic effect. He was inclined to deliver himself of his views in like exaggerated manner. He definitely was not an atheist. He had spoken of his mother and father as being devout Catholics and said that he himself had been brought up in that faith and had attended a Catholic school. His background refuted any such notion of atheism. His views on religion seemed nevertheless those of an agnostic. If anyone spoke disparagingly of Catholicism he would spring furiously to its defense.

Eugene O’Neill, as an undergraduate, was what is called today a loner. His acquaintance with his class was extremely limited. The Class of 1910 consisted, at the beginning, of something less than 350 members. Probably less than fifty knew he existed and of this number not more than eight, whose friendship he seemed to relish and enjoy, knew him intimately. It is probably true that this group befriended him partly because of sympathy for a lonely soul, partly because of his unusual attitude towards the world which intrigued them, and perhaps because he was an interesting companion—especially when a drink or two would loosen his tongue. As a matter of fact, his fare was hard liquor, which was a shock since the undergraduate custom of the era was beer and light wine; only bums drank the other stuff. He was an inveterate cigarette smoker. He could be amusing, but he was not a particularly good storyteller. His topics of conversation were apt to be morbid. He spoke affectionately of his brother Jamie, who undoubtedly exercised a bad influence over him, and Gene would regale his friends with accounts of Jamie’s dissipations.

O’Neill roomed on the campus in University Hall, which many years prior had been an old hotel at the corner of Nassau St. and University Place. Holder Hall has now replaced it. His room was No. 30, one flight up, on the campus side. The dining hall for the Freshman Class, called The Commons, was in this building and was where he dined. Rooming and dining in the one building and leaving it only to go to classes made him all the more a recluse. Even other occupants of University Hall had no recollection of him. He admitted to an occasional lone walk about the countryside. He took no part in athletics, nor in any extra-curricular activities such as The Daily Princetonian or other publications; nor even in the theatre about which he had a lot of knowledge from traveling with his family on his father’s tour of the country acting on the stage.

In the dining hall in The Commons he kept aloof mainly because of an intense shyness. He would not drift into a group to dine. He was not gregarious. The small group of friends he had tried to get him to join an eating club. Various congenial groups would get together to form eating clubs designated by a certain color of hat. The Freshmen were allowed, by tradition, to wear these hats after February 22. Prior to that date every Freshman wore a traditional black cap known as a beanie. This was about the only thing this non-conformist would conform to, this, and the plain black tie, which Freshmen had to wear, and a black slicker raincoat on wet days. (Of course, he observed obligatory chapel attendance and went to classes.) It should be added, he was always well-dressed and neat in appearance.

This small group of friends finally persuaded Gene to join one of these Freshman eating clubs. However, there were obstacles to overcome. The majority of the clubs had only the slightest awareness of O’Neill; consequently, not knowing him, they simply black-balled him. This annoyed his friends. Tom Welch, one of this group who liked Gene, was president of the White Hat club and a popular football player in the class. When Gene’s name was again put up, Tom picked for his ballot counters those who were friendly to Gene. They fixed that situation and he was accepted without a protest from those who knew they had cast a negative vote.

For the first half of the college year little is known about O’Neill among this small group of friends. It must be assumed that he did try to gain academic knowledge during that period because there is no record of any escapades and he did pass his mid-year examinations or a sufficient number of them to permit him to continue in college. There were signs of continued effort, with lapses, after mid-year. It was during the second half of the college year that his friends really begin to know