University of Virginia Library

The Real Eugene O'Neill
By OLIVER M. SAYLER
Drawing by WILLIAM ZORACH

ONE of our most unmistakable traits as Americans is to personify ideas and movements in human guise. We like, for instance, to make Foch stand for Allied invincibility, Lenine for the spirit of revolution, or Edison for our native ingenuity. Having our idol or devil, we set about to inquire with prying curiosity into the inmost intimacies of those whom we have chosen thus to honor. It is a bit disconcerting to us, therefore, after agreeing upon Eugene G. O'Neill as the personal symbol of our awakening American drama, to find that little is known about the man himself. True, he has had four plays on Broadway in the last two seasons, "Beyond the Horizon," "The Emperor Jones," "Diff'rent," and "Gold." Two more will have reached the stage by the time these lines are read, "The Straw" and "Anna Christie," while a third, based on a legend as old as man, is likely to be disclosed before another summer arrives. Yet despite this wide and growing acquaintance with O'Neill as a dramatist, the man remains for the general public only a name, a symbol, a luring and mysterious example of that association with the sea which has always stirred the imagination.

I doubt whether any other contemporary has bothered so little as O'Neill whether the public was curious about him or not. Certainly, there is in his work no deliberate challenge to find out, if you can, what he is like, no conscious bait for the busybody. That is probably only another way of saying that he is primarily the artist, that there is nothing of the propagandist in him, no desire to stimulate interest in his dogmas and theories or in himself as guaranty of further attention to those theories. I do not believe he has any theories; theories are fallible, undependable things.

After all, though, there is close kinship between O'Neill the playwright and the man, and to know the man is to understand his work the more clearly. For out of the life he has lived and the philosophy he has gained from it he draws many of the characters and scenes and ideas for his plays; and even when he goes to his imagination for the raw material, his checkered experiences on sea and land invariably color the use of it.

§ 2

O'Neill's life has been composed of just those struggles, and he has overridden just those obstacles, in just those ways that we like to think are characteristic of our continent. The old Barrett House at Forty-third Street and Broadway was his birthplace a little over thirty years ago, and from Gotham he was carried to the

four winds of the country by his father, the late James O'Neill, then at the height of his fame in "Monte Cristo." Private schooling prepared him for Princeton, but he soon ran afoul of the authorities there, and began a vagabond career that led far beyond the horizon. Secretary to a mail-order firm in lower Broadway and boon comrade of Benjamin Tucker and other radicals; gold prospector in Honduras, and victim of fever there; assistant manager for Viola Allen in "The White Sister" in the Middle West—these were the early chapters. Lured then by Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus," he shipped on a Norwegian bark for Buenos Aires, and the Argentine capital held him exile for a year and a half in service to Westinghouse, Swift & Singer. A voyage to Durban, South Africa, and back was holiday, and finally he returned on a British tramp to New York, whence he shipped several times as able seaman in the American Line. Further adventures on land as denizen of the docks, friend of gamblers and Tammany ward-heelers, actor and newspaper reporter, culminated in an attack of tuberculosis, and incidentally in leisure to set to paper his first crude dramatic experiments, "Thirst and Other Plays," published at his father's expense in 1914. The following winter he devoted to Professor Baker's English 47 at Harvard, and thenceforth the scenes of his labors as growing playwright have been those two aspects of the same mood, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

To-day, in the old coast-guard station at Peaked Hill Bar, on the ocean, across the shifting sand-dunes from the village of Provincetown, while his young son Shane plays on the beach, and his wife, Agnes Boulton, writes short stories in the room where they used to lay out the corpses after a wreck, he sits listening to the eternal tale of the surf he loves, and molds in form of plays the struggles of men and women he has known and of those from other times whom his experience has taught him to understand. Beneath the sun in the sand of some secluded cove he lies dreaming like primitive and pagan man. And when the sea is fine or when it isn't,—it doesn't much matter,—he is off alone in his kayak over the waves, a startling visitor at times to the deep-sea fishermen, who are too much astounded at the apparition to heed his plea for a sample of their catch. For life is constrained at Peaked Hill Bar. The outward conveniences of civilization are there, installed at the whim of Samuel Lewisohn, who for a fleeting holiday rescued the coast guards' abandoned cabin from decay a few years ago and then sold it to O'Neill. But the larder is dependent on the wagon that crosses the dunes once a week, and in sand-locked exile the vagrant of the seas pays for his repose and privacy in terms of some of the difficulties he knew in the forecastle.

This lifetime of adventure, crammed into a few aimless, wild, carousing, feverish years, has left its record. stamped relentlessly on O'Neill's face, his manner, and his mind. The nature of that record, though, reveals a personality immune to the usual results of such adventure. There is no slackening of the inner fire, no flabbiness of muscle or of mental fiber. He has caught himself and found himself in time, and the same boundless energy which carried him across

the conventional boundaries of living, instead of being scattered and wasted, is now concentrated on the single task of expressing himself through the medium of the theater. Tall and trim of frame and dark of complexion, with eyes that pierce when they look up, and with a mouth that takes nothing in life for granted, he presents a singularly intense, but reticent, figure. Life has given him poise and severe judgment and a corresponding deliberateness of mental process and of speech. Nothing ruffles him or excites him. He is neither ashamed nor proud of his devil-may-care past. There it is, in the past; and here he is now. And what else matters? Therein lies the real realist. And with all these more sober traits, alongside disillusionment and a fatalism that is almost cynical at times, there are a kindliness in little things, a naïve simplicity, and a sense of quiet humor. It is well to call these traits to the attention of those who dub him our prize pessimist, for sooner or later they may find expression in his work as leaven for prevailing gloom.

§ 3

O'Neill entered the theater by the side door of the one-act play. Some of the earlier ones were incredibly bad. If he had written nothing better than "Thirst" and "Fog" and the others in that early groping volume, his name would not be known beyond the amateur stages of the Little Theaters. But in association with The Provincetown Players and The Washington Square Players he struck his pace, and the seven resultant sketches of life at sea, published recently under title of "The Moon of the Caribbees," are sufficient to themselves, and at the same time foreshadow the longer, more sustained work that has followed. With Richard Bennett's production of "Beyond the Horizon" in February, 1920, the playwright came professionally of age, and that arrival at majority was doubly confirmed last season with "The Emperor Jones" and "Diff'rent," both of which were first disclosed by The Provincetown Players in Macdougall Street, and later were taken to Broadway for wider audience. "Gold," in the final month of the season, neither added to nor subtracted from his reputation, for the production was too inept to bring out the play's merits or reveal its defects. Like its successors this season, "The Straw" and "Anna Christie," it is fair to consider it here only in its unacted form.

Just as O'Neill the man is largely the result of the life he has lived, so O'Neill the artist is product and expression of the man. The impact of life upon him, which opens his eyes to things as they are, finds creative outlet in the somber and ironic etchings of "The Moon of the Caribbees" series, in the grim and candid severities of "Beyond the Horizon" and "Diff'rent," in the meticulous chronicle of stalking disease of "The Straw," and in the frank moral adjustments of "Anna Christie." It is just like him to see and admit and reveal the pitiable intimacies of common sailors in his one-act sketches, the tragic consequences of misplaced careers in "Beyond the Horizon," the appalling dénouement of sex repression in "Diff'rent," the heartrending realization of love after it is too late in "The Straw," and the futile efforts of a vengeful mariner to outwit the sea, the "Old Davil," in "Anna Christie."

All these plays are the logical outcome of a mind that has known life bitterly face to face, but not long enough to become cowed by it or sentimental over it. Call this cynicism if you like, but there is nothing of the cheap striving for effect which we usually associate with cynicism. Neither is it mere sophomoric impatience with a disillusioning world. O'Neill is too terribly in earnest and too firmly grounded in experience to make either of those mistakes. It is just possible that greater maturity will temper his harshness without relaxing his honesty and conviction. It did that with Ibsen. It did not with Strindberg.

The plays in one act published as "The Moon of the Caribbees" are like the pencil-sketches an artist makes before he sets to work with oil and canvas. And just as the preliminary drawings of Leonardo and Turner and Whistler are preserved not only for their sentimental associations, but even more for their intrinsic worth, these short dramatic studies by O'Neill are bound to retain the respect they commanded on their first appearance. They may even be valued more highly as time goes on. The best of the playwright's early work has been gathered together in this group, and it will serve as base-line for consideration of whatever else he has done or will do.

The heart of this early work is a series of episodes in the life on sea and land of the motley crew of the British tramp steamer Glencairn. Scotch and Irish, Swede and Russian, Yank and Briton, all rub shoulders and match their wit and profanity on deck and in forecastle and in sea-port dive. These are the men the playwright knew in his own years before the mast, and he has drawn them with swift, sure strokes. To meet them on the printed page, though, is to catch only fleeting glimpses of them. O'Neill's instinct for the theater is already unmistakable here, for these men and their women become their vivid selves only when embodied on the stage. And when they are so embodied, the comparative lack of plot or story is forgotten in the realization that these outcasts have known close contact with some profound moment of life.

In "The Moon of the Caribbees" that chastening moment comes to Smitty, the "Duke," when memories of a girl back home, assisted by the stimulus of rum, steel him against the luring temptations of the bumboat negresses and the crooning chant from shore in West Indian harborage. "S'pose there's a gal mixed up in it some place, ain't there?" puts in the donkeyman to the restive Smitty, and the reply comes stiffly: "What makes you think so?" "Always is when a man lets music bother 'im," is the retort. "An' she said she threw you over 'cause you was drunk; an' you said you was drunk 'cause she threw you over. Queer thing, love, ain't it?" Beyond the range of Smitty's testing, the play is just a picture, a vivid, startling canvas like those in the current exhibitions, with bold splashes of color applied carelessly, it would seem at first glance, but really with unerring precision.

Similar impact of the essence of life upon the humdrum course of every day, against the same vivid pictorial backgrounds, characterizes the other three plays of the Glencairn series: the incomprehensibility of death when it strikes one of the crew in "Bound East for Cardiff," the fatal recurrence

Eugene O'Neill

[Description: Drawing of Eugene O'Neill ]

of accident which keeps a homesick sailor tied to the sea in "The Long Voyage Home," and the mutual humiliation which abashes both victim and tormentors when, as conclusion to the panicky solemnities of "In the Zone," a parcel of Smitty's is found to be a bunch of old love-letters instead of the suspected bomb. Of the remaining plays preserved in this volume from their experimental production, one of them, "Where the Cross is Made," is interesting chiefly as the germ from which the longer play "Gold" was made. "The Rope" is a study in the sour and sardonic consequences of greed, while "Ile" penetrates to the frozen North to relate the coming of madness to the wife of a whaling captain, crazed by the loneliness of the polar sea.

"Beyond the Horizon" was O'Neill's first full-length play, and the first of any length to reach the professional stage. It bears the marks of immaturity and early composition. It is too long by a fourth or a fifth, and has to be compressed that much in performance. It is broken up into too many scenes—two for each of its three acts—for the most effective interpretation by our clumsy contemporary stage machinery. It is needlessly disregardful of the practical limitations of the theater, too, in demanding realistic outdoor settings that the designer cannot make illusive, and its psychology is marred by the presence of a youngster of two who speaks the language of four at the least. But, despite these flaws, it is sound and convincing drama, a play that cuts clean home to the primal facts of life and stirs the tragic emotions like no American contribution to the theater since "The Easiest Way." The award to its author of the Pulitzer prize for 1920 was frank and prompt recognition of its superior merits.

I know of few plays in the modern theater which plunge so inexorably downward in tragic disintegration of human hopes as "Beyond the Horizon." There is no compromise here with life or with the traditions of the stage. There is something almost Greek in the austerity of the tragedy, for, despite the homely and starkly honest realism of scenes and characters and speech, the catastrophe is classic in that it proceeds not so much from conscious or avoidable mistakes as from the grim fatality of a choice whose innate consequences its victims were unprepared to foresee.

O'Neill's accomplishment, it seems to me, consists not only in following this catastrophe with stern veracity to its inevitable conclusion, but also in conveying by subtle and unobtrusive touches the impression of unremitting dissolution, of the appalling gloom of the years that intervene between the mile-posts of these crucial episodes he has selected to bear the burden of his narrative.

§ 4

In "Diff'rent" O'Neill has done both a greater and a lesser piece of work than in "Beyond the Horizon"—lesser in the extent of his canvas and in the restricted significance of his psychological problem; greater in its concentration, in its capitalization of inherent difficulties, in its disturbingly frank and realistic speech, and in the same keen and searching insight into human motives as applied to more elusive and unusual characters and situations.

It may seem contradictory to say

that a play loses in importance by its limited subject and gains by the playwright's skilful treatment of that subject, but the paradox is more apparent than actual. The greatest plays of all time have been written about the simple and primal problems of human life. But there is a fineness and precision of workmanship in miniature, as it were, which is not to be despised and which until now has been monopolized by European dramatists like Strindberg and Tchehoff and Wedekind. Such a detailed mastery of the nuances of life is probably the goal and the function of realism in the theater as well as in the other arts. Heretofore we have had no American playwright sufficiently sensitive to these back-waters of human experience or articulate enough in reporting his observations to bring to us an American counterpart of "The Father" or "The Sea-Gull" or "The Awakening of Spring." Among his varied talents, O'Neill has proved that he possesses this mastery of miniature, for "Diff'rent" is unquestionably the most expert, if not the most powerful and moving, example of realistic drama that we have produced in this country.

The very qualities which give "Diff'rent" its value make it almost impossible to convey any accurate idea of its substance or its peculiar merits. It is easy, of course, to point out the obstacle of the gap between the two acts, which ordinarily would break the tragedy into two separate plays; but it is not so easy to specify the shadings and contrasts of scene and language and character by which the author has made the interval serve the purposes of a deeper unity. These are the subtle privacies of the theater, as untranslatable in words as the modulations of the musician or the color harmonies of the painter. Such are the means, too, by which the inmost thoughts and feelings of these distraught figures are revealed with an intimacy that makes observation of them almost embarrassing.

Something of the same problem faced O'Neill in "The Straw," another realistic tragedy, with its setting in a sanatorium for consumptives. "The Straw" was written long before "Diff'rent," but though available in published form, it has reached the stage too recently to be considered here as acted and actable drama, the only way it is fair to judge works so manifestly intended for the actual stage as those of O'Neill. From a reading of the play, though, it seems to me that he was not yet so sure of his touch when he composed it. Like "Beyond the Horizon," it is far too long, and, unlike "Diff'rent," it seems to leave too little to the imagination, as even the realist must do if he is to make art out of photography. Still, the story of Eileen Carmody's unrequited love for her fellow-patient in the sanatorium, Stephen Murray, her wasting away and his realization, when it is too late to save her, that he, too, has come to love passionately, is a tale as deeply and pitifully moving as any O'Neill has yet devised. "Anna Christie" is still in guarded manuscript as this survey is made.

§ 5

So much for the playwright as realist. Then there is the other side of O'Neill—the side that may, perhaps, be counted on to mitigate the severity of his realism if it doesn't altogether displace it. It is the quality which was first feebly discernible in

"Fog," published with "Thirst" seven years ago—the quality which found surer expression in "Where the Cross is Made" and the longer play derived from it, "Gold"; the quality which was finally dominant for the first time in "The Emperor Jones," that soul-baring tragedy of a black monarch thrown back on his personal and racial fears in flight from his rebellious subjects. It is the quality of the imaginative, of a new and virile kind of romance, which has thus grown to a ruling-place among O'Neill's several styles of expression. Here, too, as in his realism, the issue is tragic, but with a profounder pity, a readier sympathy and admiration for the struggler against fate. This is the O'Neill whose eyes have got the better of his mouth, whose own vital force found anchorage in time, but not before he had seen the essential tragedy of life face to face on stormy seas, in unkempt lodging-houses, and notorious barrooms.

It has been O'Neill's misfortune to have his plays reach the stage out of the order of their composition. "Gold," therefore, seems to have been the successor to "The Emperor Jones," though in reality it is a considerably older piece of work. Its progenitor, the one-act sketch, "Where the Cross is Made," is a fantastic study of an old sea-captain who finds what he thinks is treasure while marooned on a tropic isle, who sends his comrades back to rescue it, and who goes mad awaiting their return. There is too much antecedent action, too much to be explained for the one-act form, and O'Neill, therefore, expanded his material into a full-length play, with the first scene on the island, the second and third at home preparatory to the dubious voyage, and the last in Captain Bartlett's ghostly cabin atop his home, whence in his madness he peers out to sea in vain for the lost Sarah Allen. It is almost impossible to tell from the clumsy production of the play just what are the values and the possibilities of "Gold." It is fairly evident, though, that the second and third acts are weak and that the author was feeling his way toward a new romanticism in the psychology of the mystical and the subconscious.

I asked O'Neill not long ago what the theater meant to him and life.

"The theater to me," he said, "is life—the substance and interpretation of life."

"And life?"

"Life is struggle, often, if not usually, unsuccessful struggle; for most of us have something within us which prevents us from accomplishing what we dream and desire. And then, as we progress, we are always seeing further than we can reach. I suppose that is one reason why I have come to feel so indifferent toward political and social movements of all kinds. Time was when I was an active socialist, and, after that, a philosophical anarchist. But to-day I can't feel that anything like that really matters. It is rather amusing to me to see how seriously some people take politics and social questions and how much they expect of them. Life as a whole is changed very little, if at all, as a result of their course. It seems to me that, as far as we can judge, man is much the same creature, with the same primal emotions and ambitions and motives, the same powers and the same weaknesses, as in the time when the Aryan race started toward Europe

from the slopes of the Himalayas. He has become better acquainted with those powers and those weaknesses, and he is learning ever so slowly how to control them. The birth-cry of the higher men is almost audible, but they will not come by tinkering with externals or by legislative or social fiat. They will come at the command of the imagination and the will."

All of O'Neill's plays have reached the stage from their author's imagination by medium of a penciled handwriting so small that it takes a lens to read it. Several times he has tried to enlarge his script so that some one else could copy it, but he has always relapsed after a few pages into blinding miniature. Meticulous and deliberate, perfectly formed, a page from the drawing-board on which he composes seems to typify the exactitude, the power of penetration, and the relentlessness of the mind that guides the hand. In that same intense, introspective cipher, with a patience born of hours and months at sea, is emerging slowly the ambitious panorama of his legend drama. In it, later, will come another negro play as original in conception as "The Emperor Jones," and a trilogy analyzing and interpreting our materialistic civilization that is still dimly in the back of his head.

It is too early yet to try to place Eugene O'Neill as playwright and as artist. He has just begun his career, but in some ways he seems to have begun it at a point beyond where many others have left off. Whether he can sustain the pace he has set himself and develop it with the variety and the flexibility demanded by the day in which he lives, is a question for time to answer. I do not think he is nearly so much interested in the answer as he is in completing the job in hand. And that is a good sign. It is a good sign, too, that he has chosen as his head-master in his profession such a one as Synge, and it is an even better sign that he has caught the secret of the master without slavishly copying him; for no one more than O'Neill recalls so distinctly the lyric speech of the author of "The Playboy of the Western World," that quality in dialogue which cries out to be spoken aloud—a quality observed by both with a quick ear for the cadence of the colloquial.

After all, though, O'Neill is roundly and soundly American, the product of our life and our thought and our civilization. To call him our greatest living playwright, though, even if he deserved it, would not be very flattering just now. Greater than what other? The field is discouragingly barren. Perhaps it is just as well to leave the question open by admitting that he points the way toward one worthier than himself, and that he himself in full maturity may be the one to whom he shows the way.