Tony Kushner, Eugene O’Neill’s true theatrical descendant, described the impact of the man whose work transformed 20th-century American theatre when he wrote: “Much that an American playwright needs to know can be learned by studying Eugene Gladstone O’Neill’s life and work.”
In this fast-paced, highly readable study, Robert M Dowling, a professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, charts that life and work in a powerful narrative, with a fresh perspective and some previously unpublished material. He breaks the action into four acts, building to a devastating last act, when insanity, violence and betrayal bring this eventful story to a dramatic climax.
Eugene O’Neill, born in 1888, was the third son of James O’Neill, one of the most popular actors of his time, and Ella Quinlan. James, born in Kilkenny, emigrated with his family during the Famine. Ella was born in Cleveland to a family that had also been displaced by the great hunger. Being Irish was hugely important to James O’Neill, and he instilled a strong sense of Irish identity in his children. Many years later Eugene said, “I was reared with a hymn of hate for England the predominant lullaby.”
The life of a travelling actor was not an easy one for a growing family, and it took its toll on Ella. The death of her second son was a devastating blow that led to a two-decade morphine addiction, later revealed in O'Neill's posthumous masterpiece, A Long Day's Journey into Night.
On the road
The only home the young O'Neill knew was a summer house in New London, Connecticut. He spent most of his childhood in hotel rooms and temporary accommodation while his father barnstormed the country with his great melodramatic performance in The Count of Monte Cristo.
Eugene grew to loathe the “old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff” that had sustained his father’s career for so long. A visit by the Abbey Theatre to New York in 1911 electrified the fledgling writer. “The Abbey first opened my eyes to the existence of a real theatre, as opposed to the unreal – and to me then – hateful theatre of my father, in whose atmosphere I had been brought up.”
After some early adventures at sea, a short-lived marriage, the birth of his first child, and a bout of TB, O'Neill became part of a growing artistic and anarchist movement in downtown New York. His time in that demi-monde proved fruitful as background to one of his most accomplished works, The Iceman Cometh, set in a dive bar in Greenwich Village.
As one of O’Neill’s contemporaries remarked, “Much of his best work came from the time when he was bumming around. He liked the people from the lower depths.”
With a group of other young artists O'Neill founded the Provincetown Players, first in Cape Cod and then in New York. It was there that he began to transform American theatre with a series of plays that astonished – and at times horrified – New York theatregoers. With his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, critics began to take notice of this new talent. A prominent critic described O'Neill as "the one writer for the native stage who gives promise of achieving a sound position for himself".
That “sound position” quickly became a major career and, almost immediately, earned him an international reputation. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and, in 1935, was the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
O'Neill broke ground in many ways. His use of masks, his focus on psychological realism and his heightened tragic themes were startling to a Broadway audience raised on vaudeville, melodrama and musical comedies. All God's Chillun and The Emperor Jones had African-American leading characters, and he insisted that black actors should play these roles. This was revolutionary in Jim Crow America, where "blackface" was the theatrical norm. He faced personal threats from the Ku Klux Klan but, bravely, refused to back down.
Uneven stretches” O’Neill’s professional trajectory was not entirely upwards. As Dowling wisely notes, “contrary to the useless mythology of genius, O’Neill’s writing consisted of uneven stretches of creative doldrums punctuated by flashes of staggering brilliance, a heartrending process in which he achieved the highest possible stature as a playwright through sheer force of will”.
His greatest plays came at the end of his creative life. He had won all his major awards with earlier, more innovative work, however. He was a true pioneer and led the way for a generation of American writers.
O’Neill’s personal life, which fuelled so much of his drama, was filled with a series of emotional highs and lows. Within a span of three years his parents and his brother died. He was a lifelong alcoholic and could be violent and destructive. He regularly attacked his second wife, Agnes, and in a drunken rage destroyed a beloved portrait of her father by shredding it “till it was a mass of tattered ribbons”. He had complicated relationships with his three children, two of whom died by suicide, and all three of his marriages were fairly disastrous.
Dowling is particularly strong describing his relationship with O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta, whose own mental state was precariously balanced. Her shocking behaviour during a 1951 incident at their home in Marblehead Neck, Massachusetts, tells much about their deeply conflicted relationship. Walking in the grounds, he fell in the snow and broke his leg. Refusing to get help, Carlotta mercilessly taunted him until he blacked out. He was fortunate to be discovered before he died of hypothermia.
O'Neill completed A Long Day's Journey into Night, his greatest play, in 1941. He described it as a work of "old sorrow, written in tears and blood". He was adamant that it shouldn't be published until 25 years after his death. Carlotta ignored that clear directive, however, and offered it to Yale University Press in 1956, three years after his death. It was first produced in Stockholm that year and, shortly afterwards, on Broadway.
Whatever about the morality of her actions, Carlotta did the world a favour in allowing contemporary audiences to see this masterpiece, which laid bare all the terrible secrets of the O’Neill family. Tony Kushner wrote that her “betrayal of his wishes must be seen by us as an act of beneficence. He fell silent, isolated himself, withered and died. And rose again, almost immediately.”
This well-written biography brings him vividly to life again.
Joe Dowling is the director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and a founding director of the Gaiety School of Acting
