University of Virginia Library

The Uncertain Origins of Eugene O'Neill's "Bound East for Cardiff"
by
Paul D. Voelker

In May, 1914, during his first year of playwriting, Eugene O'Neill copyrighted three new plays. Of the three, only "Children of the Sea," a oneact play copyrighted on May 14, was to receive much more than the passing recognition accorded by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. Some two years later, in the summer of 1916, bearing the new title "Bound East for Cardiff" and having undergone further revisions, it achieved the distinction of being the first O'Neill play ever performed. Four months later, it became the first O'Neill play to open in New York City. At this time, "Cardiff" also first appeared in print, in Frank Shay's The Provincetown Plays, First Series. After that, it was printed in O'Neill's second published collection, The Moon of the Caribbees, and Six Other Plays of the Sea (1919). It has been continually available ever since. The fate of the original "Children of the Sea" was, of course, less spectacular; neither published nor performed during O'Neill's

lifetime, it entered the public domain on May 14, 1942, but remained virtually unnoticed for another twenty years.

Since 1916, "Cardiff" has become an important play. Not only is it O'Neill's first produced play, but also, with its New York opening, "Cardiff" served to usher in a new period in the American theatre; moreover, that opening was the first of more than thirty O'Neill first nights to occur in New York during the next two decades. But "Cardiff" is also important because it has become the traditional benchmark of O'Neill's dawning maturity as an artist of the drama. It makes little difference which of the many books on O'Neill, critical or biographical, old or new, which one picks up. The judgment is virtually the same. Of the fifteen plays O'Neill is known to have written during his first two years of playwriting, "Cardiff" is considered to be, in the words of Barrett Clark, O'Neill's first biographer, "the one really mature play he [O'Neill] wrote in the 'prentice years . . ." (Eugene O'Neill, The Man and His Plays, rev. ed. [1947, rpt. 1967], pp. 53-54). The more recent books on O'Neill have simply concurred in this judgment.

In doing so, the critics and biographers have the clear warrant of O'Neill himself. In a letter to the critic Richard Dana Skinner, O'Neill noted of "Cardiff": "Very important from my point of view. In it can be seen, or felt, the germ of the spirit, life-attitude, etc., of all my more important future work" (Eugene O'Neill, A Poet's Quest [1935; rpt. 1964], p. viii).

Given the importance of "Cardiff," it is somewhat surprising that the original "Children of the Sea" is so little known and that it has not received any special scholarly and critical analysis. Its virtual disappearance for almost fifty years is only partly responsible; in addition, there are the efforts of O'Neill himself and of his biographers.

From 1916 on, O'Neill tended to be rather reticent about discussing his first plays. For example, in his letter to Skinner, O'Neill included, in Skinner's words, "a brief outline" of "the actual sequence in the writing of the plays . . ." (p. vii) which O'Neill had completed at that stage of his career. However, the list is incomplete where his first plays are concerned. For the fall and winter of 1913 and 1914, O'Neill listed only "The five one-act plays in 'Thirst'" (p. viii). (The reference is to his first published collection, Thirst, And Other One-Act Plays [1914].) But as subsequent investigation has revealed, previous to those five he wrote and copyrighted, but never published, another one-act play, "A Wife for a Life." About the spring and summer of 1914, O'Neill was even more misleading. He mentioned only "Cardiff." He did not refer to "Children" or to four other plays, two of them full length, which he also wrote and copyrighted during that period. The pattern is clear; he acknowledged none of the plays which had not been published.

O'Neill was somewhat more forthcoming with Barrett Clark; Clark, at least, was informed of the titles of the unpublished early plays. But if Clark knew that scripts for five of them had been copyrighted and had, in fact, entered the public domain in 1941 and 1942 before he published the 1947 revision of his book, he kept the information to himself and stated only that they had not "survived" or "were destroyed" (p. 49).

The situation changed with the publication of Lost Plays of Eugene O'Neill in 1950. This unauthorized volume of five early plays which had entered the public domain indicated that the Library of Congress housed a quantity of previously unknown O'Neill material. This knowledge was utilized by the second generation of O'Neill biographers, and Arthur and Barbara Gelb in O'Neill (1962; rev. ed. 1973) and Doris Alexander in The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill (1962) subsequently reported the existence of "Children of the Sea." But their comments were not an encouragement to further research. According to the Gelbs, when O'Neill revised "Children" into "Cardiff," he made "only minor changes" (p. 260), and according to Alexander "only slight changes" were made (p. 188). Similarly, O'Neill's third-generation biographer, Louis Sheaffer, in O'Neill: Son and Playwright (1968), noted only "slight revisions and a new title" (p. 278). Nevertheless, "Children" has finally been published, in Jennifer McCabe Atkinson's "Children of the Sea" and Three Other Unpublished Plays by Eugene O'Neill (1972). Consequently, it is now possible for anyone to make his or her own comparison of the latest version of "Children" and the first published version of "Cardiff"; but when this is done, the results are not precisely what one might expect, based on the reports of O'Neill's later biographers.

The changes and revisions O'Neill made in "Children" which transformed it into "Cardiff" seem to be more than "slight" or "minor" ones. Not only did he revise individual lines of dialogue and stage directions, he also cut an entire page from his original twelve-page typescript. In addition, he rearranged the order of three key scenes. Finally, these and other changes suggest that he may ultimately have been trying to do more than simply polish the script of "Children," but may have been trying instead to modify significantly the focal point and thematic implications of the earlier version.

The one-page cut is the most obvious difference between "Children" and "Cardiff." It consists of dialogue between the play's two main characters, the dying sailor Yank, whose death in his bunk from ship-board injuries is the climax of the play, and Yank's long-time friend and fellow seaman, Driscoll. The excised material contains a relatively long (some 350 words) speech by Driscoll and the dialogue between the two which precedes and follows it. Driscoll's long speech concerns an experience he had aboard another ship before he met Yank. As Driscoll tells it, conditions on board the ship were so bad that he was eventually led to murder the captain's mate by shoving him overboard (Atkinson, pp. 97-98; all subsequent page references to the text of "Children" will be to this edition). Driscoll's account is a powerful and moving confession; one must wonder why O'Neill chose to cut it, given that the entire one-act takes up barely seventeen pages in the published version (pp. 89-105).

An answer is suggested by noting the typical critical perception of "Cardiff" and by examining O'Neill's second major revision. Although Driscoll and Yank are clearly the two most important characters, Yank has traditionally been seen as the play's protagonist. In the words of one critic, Driscoll's "consoling, nostalgic speeches form a background for Yank's monologue"

(Timo Tiusanen, O'Neill's Scenic Images [1968], p. 45). Given Driscoll's secondary importance to Yank, O'Neill may have felt that his account of the murder of the mate took away the spotlight from Yank for too long a time. By cutting Driscoll's account and the related dialogue, O'Neill gave further emphasis to Yank's death throes. The same seems to be the result of O'Neill's second major revision.

Another O'Neill critic has characterized Yank's death as follows: "Yank accepts the loneliness and the unknown terror [of death] with the affirmation of a brave man who has faced suffering before and is prepared to do so again. . . . Thus Yank celebrates life in his heroic response to death" (Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension [1958], p. 21). In "Cardiff," a major line of action is Yank's progress toward this heroic acceptance of death. Initially, Yank is unable even to pronounce the word—"D'yuh think I'm scared to—(He hesitates as if frightened by the word he is about to say.)." This line is quickly followed by evidence of Yank's fear of being left alone on his deathbed—"Don't leave me, Drisc! I'm dyin', I tell yuh" (p. 14; this and all subsequent page references are to the text of "Cardiff" in the first published edition, The Provincetown Plays, First Series). Later, Yank repeats his plea— "No, no, don't leave me" (p. 17). Still later, however, Yank seems to overcome his fear—"I'm goin' to—(He hesitates for a second—then resolutely.) I'm goin' to die, that's what, and the sooner the better!" (p. 19). Taken together, these three lines seem to show a direct progression in Yank's attitude; but in "Children" the progression is not so obvious because Yank's second "don't leave me" (p. 102) occurs after his "I'm goin' to die, that's what" (p. 100). Thus, once again, O'Neill's revision seems to have increased the emphasis on Yank, this time by further emphasizing Yank's heroism.

At this point, one must wonder about O'Neill's underlying motivation for making both of these revisions. On the one hand, he may simply have been trying to bring into clearer focus his original intentions, but on the other hand, it is at least conceivable that these changes were the result of a change in O'Neill's original conception. Other revisions suggest that the latter may have been the case; they consist of alterations which modify the tone of the play and which, as a result, may indicate a shift in O'Neill's attitude toward both Yank and his relative importance. The first example concerns the revision of a stage direction. In the original "Children," Yank faints at one point, and Driscoll "gets a tin dipper of water from the bucket and throws it in Yank's face" (p. 95), but in "Cardiff" Driscoll "gets a tin dipper from the bucket, and bathes Yanks [sic] forehead with the water" (p. 15). (The published version of "Children" reflects O'Neill's practice of not underlining stage directions in his typescripts.)

A similar shift in tone is apparent in O'Neill's cutting of the following passage near the end of "Children." (Those portions not found in "Cardiff" (p. 24) are in square brackets.)

O'Neill's revision of the very end of the play seems similarly designed. At the end of both versions, Yank dies and Driscoll prays; then Cocky, another seaman, enters. In "Children," Cocky does not seem to realize that Yank has died and comments directly only on Driscoll.

In "Cardiff," the ending is as follows:

All of these revisions seem to point to the same end, a softening of the coarser elements and a heightening of the softer ones, the net effect of which seems to be an overall more elegaic tone than is found in the original. When this result is seen in conjunction with O'Neill's apparent efforts to give Yank more emphasis, the possibility is raised that O'Neill had altered his original perception of Yank's role and, as a result, that his original conception of the play underwent a fundamental change. Because of this possibility, the importance of the differences between "Children" and "Cardiff" transcends the issue of whether the revisions were "slight" or "minor" ones. Given the admitted importance of "Cardiff" in O'Neill's arrival at artistic maturity, the issue becomes a question of how O'Neill actually arrived at that level of achievement, and it is here that the textual differences lead to a specifically bibliographic problem.

At the present time, it is not known when O'Neill made his revisions. The copyrighted typescript of "Children of the Sea," published by Atkinson, has been stamped by the Copyright Office with the date May 14, 1914. The first printing of "Bound East for Cardiff" occurred in November of 1916 (The Gelbs, p. 320). Thus, there is a gap of two and one-half years between the latest "Children" and the earliest "Cardiff" as far as the public record is concerned. Yet, within this period, a potentially crucial phase in O'Neill's development took place; during the 1914-1915 school year: he attended Prof. George Pierce Baker's famous course in playwriting at Harvard University.

Traditionally, O'Neill's attendance in Baker's class has not been viewed as a significant factor in O'Neill's development as a dramatist; in fact, Baker has sometimes been charged with having a negative effect, most recently and in the strongest terms by Travis Bogard (Contour in Time, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill [1972], pp. 48-62). A factor which has tended to support a negative view of Baker's influence is that O'Neill did not continue in the vein of his achievement in "Cardiff" until the winter of 1916-1917 when he wrote the three other one-act plays which, along with "Cardiff," comprise the series known as S. S. Glencairn; but this line of reasoning is predicated on the assumption that "Cardiff" was completed in the spring of 1914 before O'Neill went to Harvard. The chronology of events which O'Neill presented in his letter to Skinner (p. viii) and in his conversations with Clark (p. 27) supports this assumption, and in both instances O'Neill stressed that "Cardiff" was completed before he went to Harvard. However, at the present time there is no documentary evidence to attest that, in fact, O'Neill revised "Children" sometime between May 14, 1914, and September, 1914, when he arrived in Cambridge. It is entirely possible that the revision took place either during or after O'Neill's year at Harvard.

The textual differences between "Children" and "Cardiff" and their potential biographical import have led me to attempt to narrow the present two and one-half year gap. In this effort I have examined a photocopy of the "Bound East for Cardiff" manuscript which, along with several other manuscripts of early O'Neill plays, is the property of the Theatre and Music Collection of The Museum of the City of New York. (Here I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Donald Gallup, Curator of the Collection of American Literature, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for supplying me with a duplicate of the Yale copy of the "Cardiff" manuscript, and of Mr. Grenville Cuyler, Assistant Curator of the Museum's Theatre and Music Collection, for authenticating that my photocopy is, in fact, a duplicate of the manuscript.) My examination of the "Cardiff" manuscript has proven rather surprising. There is no doubt that the Museum manuscript is actually the original manuscript of "Children of the Sea" and that it antedates the typescript (a photocopy of which is also in my possession) at the Library of Congress. The so-called "Cardiff" manuscript can in no way serve to narrow the two and one-half year gap.

That the Museum of the City of New York actually has the manuscript of "Children of the Sea" has not been previously known to O'Neill scholars, yet examination of it makes clear that it precedes the copyrighted typescript. Although there are some minor differences between the manuscript and the typescript, the two are substantially the same. Driscoll's account of the murder, the original order of the three key lines, and the other deletions noted above are also present in the Museum manuscript, and there is no indication that this material is to be cut or revised. The manuscript does contain some small revisions, however. Words are lined out and substitutes written above the line; arrows are drawn to indicate changes in position; but when the typescript is examined it is readily apparent that in it these indicated

revisions have been accomplished. Thus, the Museum's manuscript seems clearly to antedate the typescript.

The manuscript itself consists of five leaves, written in pencil on both sides. Nowhere on these leaves is there either a title or a date. These are found only on one side of a sixth leaf—" 'Bound East for Cardiff' / (1914)." This leaf seems to be a later addition to the other five. In general, O'Neill's early manuscripts are written in pencil on rather poor quality paper. By contrast their title pages are paper of good quality. The "Cardiff" title page bears a watermark which shows up (illegibly) even in the photocopy. Even more striking, when the other five leaves, which lack watermarks, are examined, it is obvious that for a considerable length of time, they alone were fastened together with a paper clip. The clip eventually rusted and stained with its outline both sides of the first and last leaves, but the title page is completely unmarked by this discoloration. Consequently, the Museum manuscript provides no evidence that "Cardiff" was completed in the spring of 1914. What is apparent after an examination of the manuscript and the typescript of "Children of the Sea" is that O'Neill wrote the play, revised it, then typed it and, in the process, made further changes not found in the manuscript; but during this entire sequence, he did not contemplate the major changes discoverable in the first printing of "Cardiff."

Given that "Cardiff" was not published until some four months after its first production in the summer of 1916, it could be hypothesized that the changes resulted not from any shift in O'Neill's conception of the play, but from considerations which arose from seeing his very first play in rehearsal. From the time O'Neill began writing plays in 1913 up to his first performance in 1916, he hoped for and sought a production of one of them; nevertheless, during this period he wrote without the benefit of seeing any of his work on the stage. Hence it is conceivable that when he did for the first time, he found aspects of "Cardiff" which were not stageworthy and thus made the major revisions noted previously. However, documentary evidence exists which suggests that this sequence is not true.

The Berg Collection of American Literature of the New York Public Library has in its possession a partial script of "Cardiff" in the hand of George Cram Cook, the man who originated the role of Yank in the summer of 1916. The Cook manuscript consists of four leaves (which I have examined in photocopy). As a "part script" for the role of Yank, the document contains, on one side of each leaf, only Yank's lines and the related cue lines. (On the back of the fourth leaf are some sketches which appear to be of the floorplan for the set.) Despite this incompleteness, however, it is clear from textual analysis that, first, O'Neill made further changes in "Cardiff" before publishing it and, second, that he revised "Children" into "Cardiff" before Cook got his script. It is also clear that in the play Cook rehearsed, Driscoll's account of the murder did not appear and that the three key lines were already in their "Cardiff" order. The Cook leaves are undated, but it seems unlikely that they were made after the first performance of "Cardiff" or even after rehearsals had started. The logical time for such a script to be made is

before the first rehearsal for the first production. If this assumption is valid, then it follows that O'Neill himself must have had a complete script of "Cardiff," either autograph or typewritten, from which Cook made his part script. The existence of such a genuine "Cardiff" manuscript is further reinforced by noting certain locutions which exist in neither version of "Children" nor in the first printing of "Cardiff." Since O'Neill did not make these revisions on the Museum's manuscript nor on the copyrighted typescript, he had to have, it seems, a third copy, perhaps a carbon of the typescript, on which to make his revisions. This third copy with its revisions would be in effect a genuine "Cardiff" manuscript. If it were located and if it were dated, the remaining two-year gap might be narrowed.

I have been unable to locate such a document in any of the three major O'Neill manuscript repositories—The Museum of the City of New York, Princeton University Library, and the Beinicke Library at Yale. Moreover, I have either visited or corresponded with all libraries which have indicated, in American Literary Manuscripts, A Checklist of Holdings in Academic, Historical and Public Libraries in the United States (1960), the possession of either substantial O'Neill holdings and/or O'Neill manuscripts and, in each case, I have found no indication of a "Cardiff" manuscript or typescript which fits the requirements. At this time, a genuine "Cardiff" manuscript seems not to be a matter of record. That O'Neill donated to the Museum his "Children" manuscript further suggests that he did not possess a "Cardiff" manuscript and that one is no longer in existence. Yet, in the summer of 1916, it must have been.

At the present time, there are only two pieces of evidence, both circumstantial, which serve to narrow the two-year gap, and both serve to place the revision in late 1915 or early 1916. First, there is the fact that O'Neill brought "Cardiff" to be produced in the summer of 1916. The Gelbs have noted that O'Neill was always most enthusiastic about his most recent work (p. 376). If he had just completed the revision of "Children," that would explain why he brought "Cardiff" rather than one of the other seven or eight plays known to have been completed after May of 1914. The second piece of evidence provides a motive for the revision. In August of 1915, O'Neill's personal friend, a real seaman named Driscoll, who served as a model for the two main characters of the play, committed suicide by jumping overboard in mid-ocean; O'Neill learned of Driscoll's death a few months later (Sheaffer, pp. 196 and 335). It seems reasonable to suggest that this news would have provided O'Neill with sufficient motivation to revise "Children" in ways which further emphasized Yank's heroism and heightened the elegaic tone of the play.

For these and other reasons, the hypothesis is very attractive that "Cardiff" was completed sometime during the fall or winter of 1915-1916. This hypothesis also explains why O'Neill did not follow the line of "Cardiff" into the other Glencairn plays until the winter of 1916-1917, and it clarifies why the tone of "Cardiff" is consistent with those three plays, as noted by both Skinner (p. 38) and Clark (p. 58), but inconsistent with the irony of the other plays from 1914. The only difficulty is O'Neill's recurrent testimony

that "Cardiff" was completed before he went to Harvard, but this difficulty is not insurmountable. O'Neill's comment to Skinner on the importance of "Cardiff" concerns the play's "life-attitude" not its construction, the only aspect with which Prof. Baker would have been concerned. If O'Neill stuck to the 1914 dating for "Cardiff," he could easily forestall any criticism that Baker had had a significant influence on his first important play when, in fact, Baker had not influenced the "spirit" at all. Given, as Louis Sheaffer suggests, that O'Neill was not averse to "mingling fiction with fact" (p. 239) where his autobiography was concerned, it is conceivable that he maintained a 1914 date for "Cardiff" simply to avoid the issue of how much Baker had influenced the play.

If "Cardiff" were assigned a later completion date, this would also explain why O'Neill told Barrett Clark he "respected" Baker's "judgment" even though Baker had told him "he didn't think Bound East for Cardiff . . . was a play at all" (pp. 27-28)—(Baker may have been referring to "Children" not "Cardiff")—and why Baker, when he wrote an essay on "O'Neill's First Decade" for The Yale Review of July, 1926, cited "Cardiff" preparatory to remarking that O'Neill "perfected himself in one-act plays before he became successful in longer plays" (rpt. in Oscar Cargill, et. al., eds., O'Neill and His Plays, Four Decades of Criticism [1961], p. 244) and gave no indication he thought "Cardiff" was not a play. But at this time, the hypothesis lacks support from any objective documentary evidence.