Staging Depth: Eugene O'neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

By Joel Pfister

Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analyzed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of 'psychological' individualism for his social class. Pfister examines the history of the middle-class family and of Freudian pop psychology in the 1910s and 1920s to reconstruct the cultural conditions for the imagining and popularizing of 'depth,' a trope that was central to O'Neill's dramatic vision. He also recovers provocative critiques by contemporary critics on the Left who challenged O'Neill's preoccupation with dramatizing psychological, familial, and aesthetic 'depth.' One of the few sustained works on O'Neill in recent years, this wide-ranging book makes a major contribution to cultural studies, to the history of subjectivity, and to scholarship on the ideological origins of modernism and modern American drama.

Originally published in 1995.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807863855

Joel Pfister

Joel Pfister, associate professor of American studies and English at Wesleyan University, is author of The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne's Fiction.

Book preview

Foreword

Staging Depth undertakes something radically new in the study of Eugene O’Neill: an interpretation of his works from the perspective of the fictions that sustained them. Formal experimentation and thematic obsession make up the usual stuff of O’Neill criticism, but Joel Pfister seeks to break that conventional mold. He practices a skeptical criticism here, one that refuses to take the author at his own word and looks instead under and beyond the author’s words and the mentality they project in search of cultural sources and historical causes. Pfister re-places O’Neill within the history of a precise segment of middle-class desire, aspiration, and self-doubt, joins O’Neill not only to a social history of shifting fortunes in the early twentieth century but also to an intellectual history of shifting values and outlooks during the period (the 1910s and 1920s especially) when corporate capitalism consolidated its domain of control within U.S. culture. Without ever allowing O’Neill to slip from sight, Staging Depth offers an acutely conceived and richly documented brief history of cultural changes in twentieth-century America.

The main issue in both the history and the literary criticism here is the concept of depth—and the category of the psychological, of which it partakes. A literary critic in the first instance, Pfister takes his historicism seriously enough actually to become a historian, and a very good one. He does not just gesture at history; he digs into sources, scours the archives, reads widely in recent monographs. The result is a well-packed and nuanced argument that ties the emergence of a distinct middle-class stratum of managers and professionals to changes in family life and sexual expectations; political movements among new women, intellectuals, and artists; the Harlem Renaissance; and experimental modernism in personal life and art. O’Neill centers this wide-ranging undertaking, and the historical discourse in Staging Depth in turn recenters O’Neill for us as a figure more than anecdotally linked to the forces that shaped his era.

It is the fusion of its author’s two roles as scholarly historian and ideological critic that makes Staging Depth such a stunning achievement. One feature of the book deserves special mention for its courage and its finesse. The deconstructive historicist criticism that Pfister practices with great skill often takes the form of a kind of scandalmongering, exposing the complicity of established writers in bad discourses of gender, race, and class and reducing them (in a form of retro-punishment) to mere reflexes of contingent need. This is not the case here. Instead, Pfister undertakes what might even be called a rescue operation on O’Neill. Not that his motive is to refurbish a reputation or repolish a tarnished greatness. Pfister manages to steer a fine course between the reigning motive of criticism to understand even at the expense of compromised literary reputation and an older motive to evaluate, to judge literary value. Because it engages so openly with the push and pull of cross-purposes—the strictly historicist and the evaluative—and because it stays its subtle course where the work of another critic might well veer to one side or the other, Staging Depth performs a significant feat in the field of cultural studies. Literary intelligence as much as historicist dexterity informs the book. Close readings of many plays share space with detailed readings of cultural and ideological discourses. Pfister manages to put O’Neill, a literary icon, through the familiar deconstructive wringer and yet salvage a sense of importance in the very works submitted to political criticism.

Not by trimming or pulling punches does Pfister accomplish the rescue of his subject. By stripping away the image attached to the writer—O’Neill’s aura of depth—Pfister discloses a figure struggling with his history, often blindly but also often with startling insight. Even as Pfister persuades us that the depth that made O’Neill famous was something staged, fabricated, clabbered together like a stage set to seem real, true to an assumed transhistorical human nature, he shows O’Neill himself caught in the agon of his culture, as much captive and victim of the illusion of depth as perpetrator of the myth, often-mordant critic as much as swaggering impresario of the depthless sense of illusory depth.

Does Staging Depth herald a turn in historicist criticism, a swerve from the neat little piles of bones picked clean that has seemed the major delight of critics bent on exposing writers for their complicity in bad discourses of gender, race, class? Pfister takes the project of historicism as seriously as anyone: antiformalism is clear on every page of his book. The experience of O’Neill’s plays is recoverable not in the lines of the plays themselves marching undisturbed across a printed page, but in the echoes and resonances of other texts of cultural belief and behavior recuperated by critical scholarship within those lines. There is the insight that depth—the notion that inward, private subjectivity is more true to personhood than public actions and networks of collective relations—is a historical effect, appearing when and how it does for definable reasons. It is an invention, something constructed to answer needs. From pop psychology to high-blown Freudian analysis it appears in conjunction with the rise into social prominence and cultural power of a new class of white-collar workers, professionals and managers, a new outcropping of salaried middle-class people beholden on the one hand to corporate hierarchies and on the other to their perhaps compensatory illusions of depth and inwardness.

Pfister treats the central O’Neill trope of the autonomous, tortured artist (the more tortured, the more depth) with thorough research and impressive insight. The remarkable fact is that Staging Depth produces a more interesting, cogent, complex, and genuinely tortured O’Neill than we have had—an artist whose private demons are revealed to be the tormented forms of cultural change and historical process. Pfister gives us an O’Neill we can see dimensionally, caught up in the dialectical swings of his era, fighting at once with and against the current. There is no other work on O’Neill quite like this one. Pfister remakes the playwright’s tortured fictions into the culture’s own barely acknowledged bad dreams.

Alan Trachtenberg

Acknowledgments

Staging Depth builds on the critical framework and historical approaches I developed in The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. The same American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1990–91) that permitted me to put the finishing touches on my Hawthorne book enabled me to do a good deal of the research for the first draft of my O’Neill book. I am indebted to the ACLS for its support. A one-term Wesleyan sabbatical that directly followed this fellowship year gave me the opportunity to complete my first draft. I thank Wesleyan’s administration not only for this well-timed sabbatical but for helping to fund both the publication of photographs and the proofreading.

My primary debt is to Alan Trachtenberg, whose deft historical and editorial criticisms, and enthusiasm, strengthened several drafts. It is an honor to have my book appear in his Cultural Studies of the United States series. Sarah Winter, whose historical critiques of Freud have advanced my thinking about the politics of psychological discourse, commented on my initial draft. Another friend, Lianna Cleland Kalmar, a great admirer of O’Neill, also read and tightened the earliest version of my manuscript. Nancy Schnog’s smart suggestions improved rough drafts of Chapter 1 and the Afterword. Our collaboration on the volume of essays we are editing, Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, has consistently helped me clarify the historical and theoretical issues at stake in my O’Neill project. Thomas J. Ferraro also read one of my earliest drafts and offered perceptive comments. David Lubin’s attentive reading contributed to my appreciation of the complexity of the theoretical issues I raise in my introduction and Chapter 2.

Wesleyan is a hothouse for cultural studies debate, research, and writing; its rare intellectual climate has nourished the growth of this book. My colleague Richard Ohmann, director of the Center for the Humanities, read several drafts of my manuscript; his own pathbreaking work on the turn-of-the-century formation of the professional-managerial class has sharpened my understanding of the role O’Neill played in the articulation of the psychological identity of his class in the 1920s. I am also grateful to Richard Slotkin for reading my work and for insisting that I not soften my ideological critique of pop psychology and psychoanalysis. Another brilliant colleague, Indira Karamcheti, read several chapters and offered discerning comments on my arguments pertaining to gender and race. Al Turco provided me with meticulous and generous criticisms of some of my interpretations of O’Neill’s plays; I have benefited from his readings of O’Neill. Jill Morawski’s extraordinary expertise in the history of psychology informed her very helpful comments on Chapter 2.

Michael Denning’s knowledge of the American Left opened up subjects to investigate in Chapter 3, and his shrewd editorial suggestions influenced me to restructure the flow of argument in the chapter. Historians Jean-Christophe Agnew, James Fisher, and Susan Pennybacker directed me to some seminal primary and secondary sources on issues of Irishness and race. Lois McDonald, associate curator of the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, not only gave me and my students fabulous tours of O’Neill’s summer home (where I was allowed to teach Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Ah, Wilderness!), she made useful observations on how the O’Neills did not (or would not) fit in to the social life in New London. The cottage itself yielded fascinating insights into the themes of O’Neill’s plays.

My work on O’Neill dates back to the late 1970s, while I was an M.A. student at the University of London. This work was in part sparked by an insightful production of Long Day’s Journey staged by the students of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. My thinking about the class politics of depth originated in a chapter of my 1985 Yale dissertation that did not find its way into my book on Hawthorne. Two friends who aided in my early efforts to unite these dual concerns—O’Neill and the politics of the construction of depth—are Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, whose scholarship, conversation, and dinner parties provided rich food for thought.

I have given talks on every chapter of this book and have learned much from the questions I have fielded. I particularly appreciated the criticisms and comments made by Alan Sinfield, Rachel Bowlby, Lindsay Smith, and my good friend Elizabeth Allen at the Critical Theory Seminar, University of Sussex. Clive Bush and his graduate students made my talks at the Institute of United States Studies and King’s College, University of London, a delight. Shamoon Zamir gave me extensive feedback both during and after my talk at the Cultural Studies Faculty Seminar, University of York. The faculty and graduate students at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture, the College of William and Mary, provided me with intellectual excitement and great hospitality when I gave my talk there. Chandos Brown, the director, did me a favor by letting the question-and-answer session run so long. I am grateful to Janice Radway both for arranging my talk at the 1993 Modern Language Association Convention in Toronto (Sociology of Literature panel) and for her comments. A paper I delivered at the 1994 Hawthorne Society meeting in Concord, Massachusetts, gave me the opportunity to discuss how both Hawthorne and O’Neill contributed to the making of the cultural category of the individual. T. Walter Herbert’s comments on my paper and on the panel I chaired were stimulating.

The librarians at Yale University and Wesleyan University accelerated the pace of my research. I am especially thankful for the assistance of Patricia Willis, curator of American literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and for the advice of the many learned librarians who work there. On more than one occasion they told me what I did not know I needed to know about their magnificent O’Neill and Theatre Guild holdings. Judith Schiff, chief research archivist of Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, put me on to the fascinating George Pierce Baker–Eugene O’Neill correspondence. The librarians at New York University’s Tamiment library (which houses materials pertaining to labor history and left-wing movements) also helped open up my research on the American Left and its thought-provoking criticisms of O’Neill. I feel privileged to have been the first scholar to use the splendid Louis Sheaffer–Eugene O’Neill collection at Connecticut College Library, and I thank Brian Rogers for his assistance. Pamela Jordan, librarian of the Yale Drama School library, has always given me good research suggestions.

Again, as with the Hawthorne book, my most significant critical exchanges have been those I have established with my students. I began teaching O’Neill in a seminar on Modern American Political Theatre at Yale, and I hope that Minouche Kandel, Richard Malley, and Sonya Baker will stand for the students who influenced my thinking in those classes. I continued teaching this seminar when I accepted my position at Wesleyan and was stimulated by the research and critical perspectives produced by students like Glenn Decker, Jason Lindsay, and Meesha Halm. In another seminar on the social and ideological origins of Freud’s cultural theory, I taught several plays by O’Neill and received superb exploratory essays by Rebecca Rossen and Sophie Bell. More recently, I have taught an O’Neill seminar entitled, The Cultural Production of the Psychological Self, and I am lucky to have had Whitney Bolden and Natalie Stone write such fine papers on O’Neill and his race plays. Many other students in these O’Neill seminars shaped my thinking and energized me; they include Keather Kehoe, Kelly Quinn, Arthur (Trace) Smith, Claire Weinraub, Emily Halderman, Dylan Leiner, Adam Hirsch, Carolyn Barth, Doni Gewirtzman, and Lee Armitage. Special thanks goes to my cultural studies student Kate Gordon, who read and commented on the final draft of the manuscript.

Everyone at the University of North Carolina Press has been supportive, enthusiastic, and creative. My editor, Barbara Hanrahan, has constantly given me sage advice.

My greatest debt remains to my family, not least of all to Redmond (six) and Jeremy (three), my explosive nephews who love to ambush me and help keep me playful.

Chronology

Introduction:

The Profession of Depth

I have looked at hundreds of photographs of Eugene O’Neill, ranging from relaxed, informal snapshots of him on the beach and at home, to formal, posed, carefully lighted professional portraits.¹ Of all these photos, there is one genre I enjoy viewing more than the others, for it so interestingly brings into focus fundamental issues at stake in my title: Staging Depth. From 1929 to the early 1940s, O’Neill chose to pose before the camera at work in a business suit—often pinstriped. One such photograph (Figure 1) shows the playwright seemingly at work revising his oedipal trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). Sitting at his desk, O’Neill faces the camera with his head tilted to his left, cigarette in left hand, pencil in right, conspicuously well tailored in his business suit, silk tie, and collar clip. Concentrated on his creative enterprise, the dramatist’s brow is furrowed and his mouth is clenched tight. The cigarette smoke ascending from hand to head seems to symbolize the smoldering artistic nervousness that finds expression in the heated-up subjectivities O’Neill is dramatizing on paper.

Figure 1. O’Neill revising Mourning Becomes Electra. Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Connecticut College Library.

Another aspect of this photograph is more pronounced in a similar shot taken in 1939 (Figure 2), apparently showing O’Neill’s minute scrawl bringing to life The Iceman Cometh (1940). In this more professional-looking photograph, O’Neill sits closer to the camera at a diagonal rather than opposite it; again he is impeccably groomed in his pinstripe business suit and tasteful silk tie. O’Neill’s artistic depth here is communicated visually by a semiotic of shadows, arranged artfully so that a bright light—inspiration perhaps—appears on his left forehead, atop his furrowed brow. Again his lips are clenched, on the verge of a disdainful pout. Both photographs of O’Neill-at-work aim to evoke the intensity, introspection, and depth that were integral to the cultural image of the man heralded since the early 1920s as America’s greatest dramatist.

Figure 2. O’Neill in 1939. Yale Collection of American Literature Photographs, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Louis Sheaffer suggests in O’Neill: Son and Artist (p. 496) that O’Neill is writing The Iceman Cometh.

But it was O’Neill’s sartorial elegance that first aroused my curiosity as a cultural historian, especially when I reminded myself that at that very moment he was ostensibly writing a play about the down-and-out moochers of Harry Hope’s saloon, men who have withdrawn from the bourgeois system of prestige symbolized by their creator’s Madison Avenue threads. If such Depression era photographs were meant to exhibit O’Neill’s smoldering subjectivity and shadowy depths, they also, revealingly, frame him as a successful member of the professional class.²

Another intriguing series of photographs of O’Neill by novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, taken in September 1933, makes more obvious one element of the playwright-as-professional portraits described above. In the Van Vechten photos (Figure 3), O’Neill appears (from the shoulders up) draped in black against a dark background. Like many of O’Neill’s photographers, Van Vechten arranges shadows so that one experiences the emotional intensity of O’Neill’s depth; but it is the blending of the black covering into the backdrop that creates the illusion of a floating head. Another pose in this series shows O’Neill’s head with eyes closed—a suspended death mask,³ perhaps a depth mask (Figure 4). Van Vechten’s photographs, more patently than the playwright-as-professional shots, display a posed interiority, an artfully lighted sense of depth. In each of the photographs I have described, this depth is a photographic effect, akin to effects produced by makeup, costumes, and lighting for characters on stage.⁴ (August Strindberg, the Swedish psychological dramatist, whose work O’Neill studied, admired, and sometimes imitated, also staged depth before the camera [Figure 5], often with himself as photographer.)⁵

Figure 3. O’Neill in 1933, photographed by Carl Van Vechten. Yale Collection of American Literature Photographs, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

As I pondered the relationship between O’Neill’s plays and these photographs, I found myself asking: How does the look of depth—evident in each of these photographs—mesh with the distinctively managerial look of the playwright-at-work (Figure 6)? What does their interplay imply? What does this professional depth tell us about how O’Neill envisioned his role as a playwright?

The metaphor depth, resonant with psychological, pathological, therapeutic, and aesthetic associations, is in fact central to the way O’Neill and many of his reviewers, critics, and biographers have understood his work. Writing in 1926 to his dear friend Kenneth Macgowan, who shared with the playwright and with Robert Edmond Jones the Triumvirate directorship of Experimental Theatre, Inc. (1923–26), O’Neill announced that his stuff is much deeper now.⁶ At that time O’Neill was working on Strange Interlude (1928), which made overt use of modern depth psychology with its interior monologues. It’s the biggest ever! he exulted. It’s a ‘work.’ I’m tremendous pleased with the deep scope of it.⁷ O’Neill’s depth drama went on to receive great acclaim as a work. Dudley Nichols of the World averred that O’Neill’s interior monologues in Strange Interlude enabled him to dive deep in the waters of life, as a deep-sea diver who invents for himself a new kind of armored suit, and brings up the monstrous forms which inhabit there. . . . [O’Neill] has not only written a great American play but the great American novel as well . . . a psychological novel of tremendous power and depth. Robert Littell’s review in the New York Post applauded O’Neill’s nine-act psychological extravaganza as an aesthetic triumph that achieved on stage the space and depth, the pauses and vast convolutions of a novel.⁸ Recent critics still single out psychological depth as the essence of O’Neill’s art and greatness.⁹

Figure 4. O’Neill in 1933, photographed by Carl Van Vechten. Yale Collection of American Literature Photographs, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Interestingly, O’Neill repeatedly denied having been inspired by Sigmund Freud or any other contemporary depth psychologist—a denial that has failed to convince a number of critics and biographers. For O’Neill understood depth as a timeless psychological space within the self sounded by authors who knew exactly where to look for it—in the family. Every human complication of love and hate in my trilogy is as old as literature, he wrote of Mourning Becomes Electra, "and the interpretations I suggest are such as might have occurred to any author in any time with a deep curiosity about the underlying motives that actuate human interrelationships in the family" (emphasis supplied).¹⁰ While not discounting the influence of psychoanalysis on O’Neill’s thinking (despite the playwright’s disclaimers), Louis Sheaffer has sought to account for O’Neill’s capacity to plumb the depths through his exhaustive two-volume portrait of the playwright’s own family. O’Neill’s conflicted family background, Sheaffer argues, endowed him with the smoldering subjectivity-in-turmoil that drove him—for therapeutic reasons—to write America’s most penetrating dramas about the depths of human nature.¹¹

Figure 5. August Strindberg, c. 1911–12. Strindbergsmuseet, Stockholm.

This therapeutic dramatization of depth brought O’Neill prestige and profit on an international scale. Not only did Strange Interlude, for instance, net O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize in a span of eight years, its productions and book sales yielded a $275,000 nest egg that helped him weather the Depression wearing pinstripes and living in mansions on two continents.¹² It was precisely O’Neill’s psychological and aesthetic depth that demonstrated the American theatre was capable of producing recognizably literary material and expressing distinctively modern themes. In recognition of this, Yale awarded O’Neill an honorary doctorate in 1926, and in 1936 he won the Nobel Prize.

Figure 6. O’Neill in the 1930s, photographed by Edward Steichen. Yale Collection of American Literature Photographs, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

By the twenties, much modern criticism read like pop psychology. Thus Robert Edmond Jones characterized the artist as one who delves into the stream of images which has its source in the deep unknown springs of our being.¹³ Critical discourse of the nineteenth century sometimes exhibited romantic assumptions akin to those articulated by Jones. In The Production of Personal Life (1991), I noted that antebellum reviewers who were fascinated by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s psychological romances introduced metaphors of surface and depth to praise his probing of the most forbidden regions of consciousness.¹⁴ The fictions of Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and of some of their contemporaries, as well as some reviews of their work, can be taken as early signs that the psychological was emerging as a significant, though not yet a dominant or a particularly glamorous, middle-class cultural preoccupation. Such authors, I argued, contributed to the encoding of a psychological identity for the middle-class self and the middle-class family that, historically, makes Freud’s later invention of psychoanalysis (and its enthusiastic reception in America) predictable.¹⁵ When the subject matter and language of psychoanalysis became popular in the United States, criticism that fused premises about depth psychology and what constitutes deep literature (such as that of Dudley Nichols and Robert Edmond Jones) acquired a cultural capital—a psychological capital—that contemporary reviews of Hawthorne’s romances lacked. D. H. Lawrence’s modernist revival of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville in 1923 was based on the cultural value of modern psychological capital. Lawrence made these authors classic in part by glamorizing them as protomodernist pop psychologists.¹⁶ O’Neill’s classics of the 1920s and early 1930s both partook of and enhanced the glamour of pop psychological concerns, concerns that—we will see—he at turns staged as deep and as intriguingly theatrical.

O’Neill’s biographers and critics, notwithstanding their many insights, have seldom considered what the photographs that have so engaged me suggest—that O’Neill’s well-groomed, professional depth, rather than the unmediated expression of the playwright’s poetic, conflicted, inner self, may be a calculated pose, a self-image, a conspicuous display of his personal wealth of psychological capital that he draws on to underwrite deep dramas. In their invaluable edition of O’Neill’s letters, Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer partially break from the critical tradition of accepting O’Neill’s image as a deep dramatist as a given. Before the romantic brooding figure be taken as the whole man, they prudently advise, it may be well to remember that it is a construction of art and criticism, an image, not the man himself. The letters disclose an ordinary man, avowing friendships, showing concern for his children [and contempt, I would add], warring with the IRS. Despite these cautionary remarks, the editors go on to reproduce the same romantic critical and biographical portrait of the deep O’Neill. O’Neill’s greatness, even for them, lies in his mission as an artist of subjectivity, the keeper of an intense flame burning out of sight of most, if not all, others.¹⁷

To be sure, O’Neill often recoiled from the media’s crass exploitation of his intense flame. By the late 1920s, when he was arranging his divorce from Agnes Boulton and traveling through France with his future wife, Carlotta Monterrey, O’Neill protested vociferously against too much notoriety: Who wants this garbage bath they are pleased to call fame? . . . I feel as pawed over by the sweaty paws of the public as a 4-bit whore—and correspondingly defiled!¹⁸ Even in 1919, before he had been defiled much, he could be irascibly protective about his image. Come now, Mr. Toohey, he said bitingly to a theatre promotion photographer who wanted him to pose pen-in-hand with the sea as a background, that’s a bit thick, isn’t it? . . . There are so many others just watering at the mouth for that weapon-in-mit close-up that I won’t be missed. . . . An author whose work is sincere and honest should see to it that he remains likewise. . . . His best place is—out of sight in the wings.¹⁹ Yet only a decade later, O’Neill exchanged the Jack London seascape backdrop for a Brooks Brothers pose, weapon in mit.

Figure 7. O’Neill with American Line sweater, c. late 1910s, Provincetown. Yale Collection of American Literature Photographs, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

By the mid-1920s O’Neill knew very well that his literary face and name were hot commodities. How about a photo for the book? he wrote Barrett Clark, who published his study of O’Neill in 1926. "I would like an O.K. on that as some of the photos used are very poor. Steichen took some fine ones this winter. Perhaps you could get Vanity Fair’s permission . . . to use one of these. If not, I strongly suggest you use Murray’s enlargement of his photo taken at the ‘lookout’ of our house at Peaked Hill, Provincetown. This is by far best of all old ones and really represents me."²⁰ Notwithstanding the sarcasm he aimed at Mr. Toohey, O’Neill turned out to be quite willing to have himself framed as the romantic American author with the sea as a background (Figure 7). By 1926 O’Neill felt sure enough about the commercial potential of his plays, his image, and his name to propose to Macgowan an O’Neill Repertory Company, an entity that would replace Experimental Theatre, Inc. Three years later, sensing the market value of his scrawl, he put out feelers about selling the original manuscripts of his plays for $100,000 (he was offered $50,000 and declined).²¹ Originally, he had agreed to write a foreword for his friend Hart Crane’s book of poems but, in 1926, got cold feet and offered the favor of a dust jacket blurb instead, aware of Crane’s publisher’s wish to acquire the notoriety-publicity value of the O’Neill name.²² His two-sentence blurb assured readers that Crane’s poems are deep-seeking.²³

Figure 8. O’Neill on the beach, flexing his muscles, exhibiting another side of the angst-ridden dramatist. Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection, Connecticut College Library. A stamp on the back of the photograph reads: From the Eugene O’Neill Collection of Jere W. Hageman.

O’Neill was thus attuned to the cultural role of the modern artist as one who publicly symbolizes a romantic-psychological self, and he knew well how to benefit from the equation of his image with depth in the popular mind.²⁴ In 1931, the year O’Neill was photographed in pinstripes, with his faraway interior look (here but not here), one interviewer described him as the bronzed, handsome, graying Mr. O’Neill . . . pretty much the ideal of what a great, melancholy and brooding playwright should look like. But several years before, O’Neill had quipped, My face is so wrinkled from the storm and stress of being a dramatist that it looks like a road map of Mars showing the canals!²⁵

O’Neill could be winningly charming and humorous as well as withdrawn and brooding, and he was at times capable of adopting an ironic view, not only of his storm and stress image (Figure 8), but of his storm and stress plays. When his legal representatives refused to allow the comedian Jack Benny to parody one of his plays on the radio, O’Neill countered by wire: THINK BENNY VERY AMUSING GUY AND BELIEVE KIDDING MY STUFF EVERY ONCE AND A WHILE HAS A VERY HEALTHY EFFECT AND HELPS KEEP ME OUT OF DEAD SOLEMN ILLUSTRIOUS STUFFED SHIRT ACADEMICIAN CLASS.²⁶ O’Neill may well have been aware of one of the most uproarious scenes in the Marx Brothers’ film Animal Crackers (1930), adapted from their Broadway production: Groucho—eyebrows in full motion—parodies the famous deep interior monologues of Strange Interlude, at the expense of two society matrons who take his smarmy surface flattery