Eugene O'Neill

Playwright

• Born: October 16, 1888
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: November 27, 1953
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

American playwright

O’Neill is commonly considered a great American playwright and honored as a writer who experimented ambitiously in a variety of dramatic modes.

Area of achievement Theater and entertainment

Early Life

Eugene O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel at a corner of Times Square. His father, James O’Neill (1846-1920), came to the United States from Ireland at the age of ten and established himself as a talented Shakespearean actor, expected to inherit the mantle of Edwin Booth. In 1883, the elder O’Neill opened as the protagonist Edmond Dantès in a dramatization of The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1845), by Alexandre Dumas, père. The play proved a spectacular success, and James O’Neill toured with it for the next fifteen years, earning up to forty thousand dollars annually to assuage his incessant fear of poverty. Later, the father came to believe that he had sacrificed his opportunity for greatness on the altar of materialism. His son took this regret as a cautionary lesson and resolved never to compromise his artistic integrity for money.

Eugene’s mother, Ellen Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922), was a devout Roman Catholic, educated in a convent in South Bend, Indiana, where she won a medal for her piano-playing but seriously considered becoming a nun. She fell in love with the dashing James O’Neill when his company toured South Bend. She accompanied her husband on his road trips for many years, all the while resenting their nomadic itinerary of frequent one-night stands, hotel rooms, and irregular meals. Eugene, once established as a playwright, developed an emphatic fondness for settled routine and a detestation of trains and hotels.

Ellen O’Neill found an escape from her aversion to theatrical traveling by becoming an increasingly addicted morphine user. She withdrew from many of her child-rearing responsibilities, leaving Eugene to be mothered, during his first seven years, by a Cornish nursemaid, Sarah Sandy, who exposed her charge to sensational horror stories. The elder O’Neill sent his son to Catholic preparatory schools in New York and Connecticut. In 1906, Eugene entered Princeton University, drank heavily, and studied very little; after a brick-throwing episode, he was failed in all of his courses and never returned to the university. For the next two years, he spent most of his time touring Manhattan in the company of his alcoholic older brother, James, Jr. (1878-1923).

On October 2, 1909, Eugene secretly married the non-Catholic Kathleen Jenkins, the beautiful daughter of a once-wealthy New York family. Two weeks later, the bridegroom left her to prospect for gold in Honduras. There he found not shining metal but a severe case of malaria; he was to use his knowledge of the tropical jungle in The Emperor Jones (1920). Even though Kathleen gave birth to a son, Eugene, Jr., on May 5, 1910, O’Neill refused to live with them on his return, ignoring his firstborn until after the child’s eleventh birthday. On July 10, 1912, Jenkins was awarded an interlocutory divorce decree.

The year 1912 proved to be the crucial year of Eugene O’Neill’s life: The nuclear O’Neill family father, mother, two sons spent the summer together in the New London, Connecticut, home of O’Neill’s parents, with Eugene writing for the local paper. In December, 1912, he was diagnosed as tubercular; Ellen O’Neill refused to accept the physician’s findings, withdrawing into morphine-induced fantasies. Miserly James O’Neill first placed Eugene in Connecticut’s Fairfield County State Sanatorium, a bleakly depressing charity institution, many of whose patients died. After staying there from December 9 to 11, Eugene had himself discharged. On Christmas Eve, James entered his son in a private institution, Gaylord Farm, which proved distinctly more therapeutic: Eugene was discharged as an arrested case on the third of June, 1913; The Straw (1921), one of his most deeply felt early plays, is a heavily autobiographical depiction of his stay there.

Life’s Work

During his sanatorium stay, O’Neill crystallized his career goal: he would be a playwright. His most pervasive influence was the intense, self-tortured, somber Swedish writer, August Strindberg. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him in 1936, O’Neill singled out Strindberg as “that greatest genius of all modern dramatists. It was reading his plays . . . that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theater myself.”

After his discharge from the institution, O’Neill boarded for a year with a private family and used this time to write thirteen plays, of which he included six one-act plays in a volume, Thirst (1914), subsidized by his father; he later disowned this collection, preventing its republication during his lifetime. From September, 1914, to May, 1915, he was a student in Professor George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard; O’Neill was remembered by classmates as handsome, thin, shy, and restless.

In 1916, O’Neill fell in love with the high-spirited journalist Louise Bryant, already the mistress and soon to be the wife of the celebrated war correspondent John Reed (1887-1920). The two men liked each other, and the trio formed a turbulent triangle that persisted close to the day of O’Neill’s second marriage to Agnes Boulton on April 12, 1918. Indeed, Boulton reminded O’Neill of Bryant: Both women were slender, pretty, and sophisticated; Boulton, however, was quiet and softly feminine, in contrast to Bryant’s’s strident manner. The marriage to Boulton lasted eleven years; its first two years are vividly described in her account, Part of a Long Story (1958). The union resulted in two children. Shane O’Neill (1919-1975) was never able to settle on a career and became a heroin addict. Oona O’Neill (born 1925) married Charles Chaplin (1889-1977). O’Neill’s firstborn son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr., tall and handsome with a resonant voice, began a brilliant career as a classicist at Yale but turned increasingly alcoholic, resigned his academic post, and, in his fortieth year, committed suicide. O’Neill held himself apart from his children throughout his life, although he did make sporadic, intense, but always short-lived attempts to reach them intimately.

O’Neill’s first important play, The Emperor Jones, dramatizes, in eight scenes, Brutus Jones’s fall from “emperor” of a West Indian island to a primitive savage who is slaughtered by his rebellious people. Jones is a former Pullman porter who escapes imprisonment for murder, finds his way to the island, and there establishes himself as a despot by exploiting the natives’ fears and superstitions. While the play’s first and last scenes are realistic, the intervening six are expressionistic, consisting of Jones’s monologues and the visions of his fearful mind as he struggles through a tropical jungle. O’Neill manages to merge supernatural beliefs with psychological effects in a powerful union that shows his dramatic affinity with two noted German expressionists, Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) and Ernst Toller (1893-1939).

Desire Under the Elms (1924) is usually considered O’Neill’s finest play of the 1920’s, his first in the classic Greek mode. It is a modern treatment of the Phaedra-Hippolytus-Theseus myth, set on a New England farm in 1850. The father, seventy-five-year-old Ephraim Cabot (Theseus), returns to his farm with a passionate new wife, thirty-five-year-old Abbie (Phaedra), who falls in love with her twenty-five-year-old stepson, Eben (Hippolytus). Like Phaedra, Abbie confronts the young man in a superb scene; unlike Phaedra, Abbie wins him. They become lovers and have a child, which Abbie kills in infancy to demonstrate her primary love for Eben. He insists on sharing her guilt; they go to jail together, remorseful over their infanticide but not over their adultery. O’Neill dramatizes in this play not only sexual but also materialistic desire: Desire for the farm causes Abbie to marry old Ephraim; resentment of his father’s usurpation of the farm from his abused, dead mother causes Eben to exact vengeance on the father he hates. The play’s multiple setting effectively counterpoints the older and younger generations, external nature and domestic temperament.

Determined to compress within his career virtually all stages of drama, O’Neill challenged Aeschylus with his longest work, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a thirteen-act trilogy. The action is a modern adaptation of the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.), with O’Neill following Agamemnon faithfully with his The Homecoming, and Libation Bearers fairly closely with The Hunted, but departing freely from Eumenides in The Haunted. The Trojan War becomes the American Civil War, with the Mannon family (House of Atreus) awaiting the return from the fighting of Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon). The daughter, Lavinia (Electra), has discovered that her mother, Christine (Clytemnestra), has been having an affair with Adam Brant (Aegisthus). In The Haunted, the playwright abandons Aeschylus in favor of Freud by having Orin (Orestes), racked by remorse for his mother’s suicide, not murder (as in Aeschylus), but transfer his incestuous feelings for his mother to his sister, who has come to resemble his mother. Lavinia rejects him, Orin commits suicide, and Lavinia realizes that she has always loved her father and hated her mother. She closes the drama by rejecting marriage to a loyal suitor, instead immuring herself, with the Mannon dead, alone in the Mannon house. This work had the most laudatory initial reception of any O’Neill play, but a number of critics have since tempered the original enthusiasm, deploring the drama’s implausibly implacable determinism, the overly clinical, self-analytic speeches of its leading characters, and the absence of even the slightest elements of humor or warmth.

From 1934 to 1946, O’Neill did not have a play produced. He spent these years largely in a Chinese-style mansion, Tao House, built to his specifications in Contra Costa County, California. He devoted most of his work to an ambitious cycle of eleven related plays dealing with the rise and fall of an American family from 1775 to 1932, to be called A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, which would offer his adverse judgment on America’s increasing enslavement to possession and greed. “We are the clearest example,” he declared, “of ’For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’” The only play of this cycle surviving in completed form is A Touch of the Poet, set in a Massachusetts tavern in 1828 and treating the marriage of Sara Melody, of Irish descent, and Simon Harford, of Yankee stock. O’Neill wrote various drafts of the cycle’s other plays but, fearing that they might eventually be performed in unfinished form, he and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, burned the manuscripts during the winter of 1952-1953. A third draft of More Stately Mansions escaped the flames and was produced in 1967.

O’Neill had met Monterey when she played the society girl in his The Hairy Ape (1922). She was a sultry brunette, usually cast as the sexually magnetic adventuress eventually to be overcome by the virtuous wife. She and O’Neill began their romance in 1928 and married in 1929, three weeks after Boulton had been granted a Reno divorce. Monterey loved O’Neill deeply but possessively, routinized his life, limited his contacts with friends, and helped estrange him from his children, whom he disinherited in his will, making her his literary executor. In his middle and later years, O’Neill both impressed and often intimidated people with his “black Irish” appearance: dark, brooding eyes; spare, rangy, five-foot eleven-inch frame; quiet, deep voice; and mysterious, reserved, often morose temperament. From 1944 to his death in 1953, an uncontrollable hand tremor, similar to that caused by Parkinson’s disease, forced him to stop writing; he tried to dictate but found that method unworkable. His final years were marked not only by physical pain but also by increasing trouble with his children and dissension with his wife. He died of bronchial pneumonia, just past the age of sixty-five.

Most critics regard two plays written at the end of the 1930’s as O’Neill’s greatest, comparable to the finest dramatic achievements of the twentieth century. The first, The Iceman Cometh (1946), is one of his bleakest dramas, set in a squalid barroom in 1912 and portraying more than a dozen drunken wrecks who alternately feed on and poison one another’s illusions. The sum of their pipe dreams represents the total content of humanity’s capacity for deception and repudiates any affirmation. The play’s theme that human beings cannot live without illusions, no matter how ill-founded parallels that of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884). Opposing the alcoholic customers of Harry Hope’s saloon in this work is a hardware salesman, Hickey, who kicks away their crutches of self-deception out of professed confidence that the truth shall set them free. Yet Hickey turns out to have murdered his long-betrayed wife, not only out of love as he at first insists but also out of a lifetime of hatred and self-loathing. Hickey, the derelicts discover, has been a false messiah; they gladly relapse into their drunken delusions. O’Neill has here written a despairing masterpiece about the impossibility of salvation in a man-centered world.

O’Neill’s other, perhaps even more magnificent, achievement is the confessional family play he prepared himself for many years to write, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). This is O’Neill’s most personal play: The O’Neills are called the Tyrones. His father and elder brother retain their own first names, James. Ellen O’Neill becomes Mary Tyrone, while Eugene names himself Edmund the name of the O’Neill brother who died in infancy. Did O’Neill, as he claims in his preface, “face [his] dead at last . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones”? A qualified yes is in order, for the author represses the painful data of his first marriage, first son, and first divorce, instead portraying himself as a sensitive, irresponsible, twenty-three-year-old would-be poet without commitments.

The play lives up to its title: It consumes the time from 8:30 a.m. to midnight on a day in August, 1912, in New London The O’Neill/Tyrone summer residence. It has the unified formality of French classical drama, with the Tyrone quartet bound together by links of resentment, grief, guilt, and recrimination, yet also by tenderness, compassion, and love. Two events charge the action: Mary Tyrone’s final relapse into morphine addiction and the diagnosis of Edmund as tubercular. In the day’s course, she moves away from the other three but especially from her younger son; he moves toward her, in vain agony. Who is to blame for their maladies? All, replies O’Neill and no one. As Mary says,

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Significance

In power, insight, scale, and ambition, O’Neill is unsurpassed among American dramatists. He began as a realist-naturalist in a native tradition that includes Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost in poetry, and Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser in fiction. His middle period is marked by intermittently effective plays, influenced by many European modes, particularly expressionism, and by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. His last work is both his best and his most characteristically American: It demonstrates a fierce determination to dig beneath the illusions and lies of everyday behavior, to assert a profoundly tragic sense of man’s shortcomings, and to reconcile himself to the melancholy state of a flawed and often unjust universe. Like tragedians from Aeschylus to Samuel Beckett, O’Neill has a desolate view of life. His talent in dramatizing that view was often flawed by self-conscious portentousness. In at least two plays, however The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night O’Neill climbed dramatic heights unscaled by any other American and rivaled by only a handful of world-renowned modern playwrights: Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett.

Bibliography

Alexander, Doris. Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Alexander differentiates O’Neill’s life from his art by focusing on his last three plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Although these plays contain autobiographical elements, she argues that it is a mistake to believe these plays are an accurate representation of O’Neill’s life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Tempering of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. This biography treats O’Neill’s life and career up to Anna Christie (1921). Alexander devotes several chapters to O’Neill’s parents and brother, follows him to Greenwich Village and Provincetown, then to his marriage to Agnes Boulton and his first dramatic successes. The book stresses O’Neill’s maturation as an artist.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. A study of O’Neill’s works that unites theatrical knowledge with finely honed critical insights. Professor Bogard also provides illuminating accounts of both the American and European theaters in the first half of the twentieth century.

Boulton, Agnes. Part of a Long Story. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. Boulton begins with her first meeting of the twenty-nine-year-old playwright in 1917 and stops with the birth of their son Shane in October, 1919. A promised second volume was never written. She relates not only the first years of O’Neill’s second marriage but also his version of his first marriage and suicide attempt.

Bowen, Croswell. Assisted by Shane O’Neill. The Curse of the Misbegotten. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Bowen is a journalist and biographer who is here considerably assisted by O’Neill’s younger son. The “curse” is the inability of the O’Neills to tell one another their love and concern, thus dooming themselves to emotionally impoverished lives. Much valuable material about Eugene O’Neill’s life.

Diggins, John Patrick. Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Biography chronicling O’Neill’s life and describing the ideas expressed in his plays. Diggins argues that O’Neill viewed frustrated desire as central to understanding American democracy, and he explains how O’Neill dramatized this key concept in his work.

Gassner, John, ed. O’Neill: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Gassner, an eminent authority on drama, has collected fifteen essays on O’Neill’s achievement. Included are adverse views from distinguished critics such as Eric Bentley, as well as laudatory articles by Stark Young, John Henry Raleigh, Travis Bogard, and others. A discriminating selection.

Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. This volume of more than one thousand pages treats O’Neill’s life and works in monumental detail. The writing is often pedestrian, but the information is usually fascinating enough to maintain the reader’s interest.

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968-1973. Sheaffer, a former journalist, devoted sixteen years to this two-volume, thirteen-hundred-page set that will be the definitive O’Neill study for many years. He emphasizes a wealth of biographical lore, obtained not only from documents but also from personal interviews. Indispensable.

Törnqvist, Egil. Eugene O’Neill: A Playwright’s Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. O’Neill played a central role in the staging of his plays, and this book describes his working conditions, audiences, and the general characteristics of his drama. Also includes analysis of individual plays.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1905: Baker Establishes the 47 Workshop at Harvard; January 21, 1908: The Ghost Sonata Influences Modern Theater and Drama; June, 1917: First Pulitzer Prizes Are Awarded; 1931-1941: The Group Theatre Flourishes; February 19, 1935: Odets’s Awake and Sing! Becomes a Model for Protest Drama; November 7, 1956: Long Day’s Journey into Night Revives O’Neill’s Reputation.