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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.
