The Life of “Eugene O'Neill”
Birth and Parentage
A
well – know play writer Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born on 16th October 1888,
in a Broadway hotel room in New York. His father, James O'Neill, was one of the
most renowned actors in American theatre, and his mother, Ella Quinlan, was a
strikingly beautiful lady who lived a quiet life. Both James and Ella came from
Irish Catholic families that had immigrated to America. But temperamentally
they were poles apart. Ella, cultured and educated, leaned towards a mystic
view of life and was reserved, romantic, and innocent. James, on the other
hand, had had no formal schooling but was gregarious, materialistic, charming, and universally loved. Their differing temperaments resulted in a destructive
marital incompatibility which formed the theme of Eugene O'Neill's several
important plays, including All God's Chillum Gore Wings, Welded, and Long Day's
Journey into Night.
Early Years
O’
Neill first seven years were spent mostly in the big towns all over the United
States-his mother accompanying his father on his road tours in Monte Cristo and
Repertoire. Actually, his mother nursed him in the wings and in dressing rooms.
These first seven years of Eugene's life were highly impressionable. If, on the
one hand, his tours with his father injected the theatre permanently into his
blood, on the other, they gave him a thorough dislike of conventions of the
romantic, commercial theatre.
Boarding Schools: Loneliness
The
next six years that O'Neill spent at Catholic boarding schools increased his
feeling of isolation. In September 1895, he entered the Mount St.
Vincent-on-Hudson boarding school. Riverdale, New York, operated by Sisters of
Charity. There he felt lost and bewildered among the strange children and the
alien, black-robed women, so terribly unlike his beautiful mother. His days and
weeks were filled with the anguish of loneliness and with a yearning for the
familiar presence that made up his universe. The hurt went deep. He felt that
he had been betrayed, cheated, and rejected by those he had trusted most. This
sense of refuge and solitude Bredin him anxiety and distrust of love, which
became one of the central problems of his life and one of the central themes in
his plays.
Rejection of Catholic Faith
On
October 16, 1900, Eugene entered De La Salle Military Institute in Manhattan.
This time he lived at home and attended daily classes at the school. De La
Salle was a Catholic school operated by the Christian Brothers. Eugene, like a
good Catholic boy, fervently prayed for the recovery of his mother and brother
from their illnesses, but when nothing came out of it, he knew that he was
through with Catholic Schools and Catholicism. His parent could not induce him
to accept any further religious training. But his rejection of Catholicism
hounded him for the rest of his life. The anguish of this rejection of faith is
clearly revealed in Days Without End. In his open rebellion and revolt against
religion and convention, he sought a substitute faith.
Betts Academy
In
September 1902, Eugene entered Betts Academy, a non-sectarian Connecticut
boarding school, where he was given a thorough grounding in the classics. He
acquired a good knowledge of Latin and French and also did well in Greek and
Roman history. From Greek history, he developed a taste for Greek drama which
became for him the mark of the highest achievement in drama. Asa results in modeled several of his plays on the pattern of Greek Tragedy.
Mentorship of Jamie
When
only ten years old Eugene had accepted his elder brother Jamie, a suffering,
cynical, alcoholic as his mentor and guide. Since then, Jamie had been a
formative and destructive influence on Eugene, whom he both loved and resented.
His letters to Eugene were tinged with sneering comments about life and
religion that had a lasting effect on the younger boy. Not only this, but Jamie
also taught Eugene how to reject his father's values by turning to a forbidden
world of drink and whores. He put his kid brother wise to live by brutally
placing him, a very young boy, in the hands of hardened prostitutes who taught
him quickly - without any glossing of romance or beauty or affection-the crude
mechanics of sex. The impact of these experiences on sensitive Eugene was
shattering. For him, sex (particularly as represented by a prostitute) became a
sign of the riot from love--the pure love he had felt for his mother--and of a
spiritual violation, a rape.
Love For Reading
O'Neill
had a great love for reading since his childhood days. By the time he was 14, he
had read authors like Kipling, Anatole France, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Oscar
Wilde, Conrad, Jack London, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Walter Scott, Byron, and Emerson. But his greatest excitement came when he discovered Shaw's
Quintessence of Ibsenism. He read and reread it during his last year at Betts
in 1906. The book came as a revelation to him. He now understood exactly what
was wrong with the romantic plays he had grown upon. Vistas of social and
intellectual revolt opened before him.
Princeton University
After
graduating from the Betts Academy, Eugene entered Princeton as a freshman on
September 20, 1906. But he soon discovered there that Princeton was excessively
tradition-bound, self-consciously superior, and clannish. He did not find there
everything in the flora of cerebral challenge or motivation. He strongly felt
that the people there were not in touch with life or on the trial of real things.
He frequently indulged in whoring and drinking and once while returning from a
drunken spree broke glass insulators on telegraph poles along the trolley line from
Trenton. He was suspended for two weeks after which he was reinstated. But he
did not want to continue and voluntarily left Princeton without completing the first year's requirements.
Self-Education
After
his exit from Princeton O'Neill was convinced that he could learn more out of college
than in. His first step in self-education was into Benjamin R. Tucker's
"The Unique Book Shop", on New York's Sixth Avenue. He spent several
hours at this bookshop, absorbing Tucker's ideas, reading his books, and
learning about the other anarchists of the day. Tucker advocated Individual
Liberty as the only satisfactory way of life, and argued in favor of “the
right of the drunkard, the gambler, the rake and the harlot to live their lives
till they shall easily recklessness them". Tucker also told O'Neill about
Max Sterner, whose philosophy of egoism, which disdained all social and ethical
standards, impressed him. But Tucker’s most significant contribution to
Eugene's education was in introducing him to Nietzsche's Thus Spake
Zarathustra. Eugene was enthralled by Nietzsche and remained so all his life.
Ibsen and Schopenhauer
O'Neill's
first job was as a secretary in a mail-order firm dealing in cheap costume jewelry.
Eugene had no interest in such a job and he got good riddance when the company
went bankrupt. He fell out with his father and moved into a studio on Broadway
and Sixty-Sixth street, which he shared with two young artists named Edward
Keefe and George Bellows. Along with them helped a thoroughly bohemian life. At
this time O'Neill saw several plays by Ibsen and was deeply influenced by them.
Later he said about Ibsen: "He's deep. all right. and dreadful, like life
itself, but he's also intensely human and understandable. "Meanwhile O'Neill
also discovered for himself the works and philosophy of Schopenhauer. He
responded profoundly to Schopenhauer's cosmic pessimism that explained his own
insane follies, which had often seemed to originate in a mysterious force beyond
his own individual will. He felt deeply the truth of Schopenhauer's vision of a
great life force working itself out pitilessly through the lives of individual
men, stirring them about in a fever of living for no close other than life
itself, so that life becomes perpetual suffering endured for a hope that always
proves abortive. He was deeply drawn to the vision of man as a creature kept in
a perpetual state of senselessness thriving by the power of the will to live.
Schopenhauer's view of individual human life as the expression of a vast
mysterious force beyond self-colored his thinking, particularly in plays like
Strange Interlude.
First Marriage
After
being involved in an affair with a pretty, young girl of his own age, Kathleen
Jenkins. he was forced to marry her on October 2, 1909, after which he decided
he had to do nothing with her. His father was glad to send him on a mining
expedition to Honduras. There he faced great hardship and found no gold. Here
turned from there in April 1910. One day he found himself signing aboard a
Norwegian baroque as an ordinary seaman. As Eugene sailed on Charles Racine,
the sea began to symbolize for him “both a source of life and a final, ecstatic
freedom from the burden of life".
In South America
O'Neill
arrived in South America with ten dollars, his wages for the sixty-five-day
voyage. But these wages were gone in one night spent at a notorious Buenos
Aires waterfront saloon called the "Sailors' Opera". In Buenos Aires
O'Neill tried his hand at one job after another. First, he took a job with Westinghouse Electric The company as a draftsman After six weeks he quit and
took a job with Swift and Company in the meat-packing center at La Plata. He
was assigned to the warehouse where rawhides were sorted. Soon after the
warehouse burned down, leaving him out of job again. He found his next
employment with the Singer Sewing Machine Company, back in Buenos Aires. But
his job there did not last long and he was fired.
At Jimmy-the-Priest's
From
Buenos Aires O'Neill had no place to go, but home, and so he signed on as an
ordinary seaman on a British tramp steamer, S. S. Akalas, bound for New York by
way of Trinidad. O'Neill was not sorry to leave them when she docked in New
York in early June 1911. There he lodged himself at the Fulton Street rooming
house known as Jimmy-the-Priest's. He settled down among the sailors,
Stevedores. truckers, anarchists, Wobblies, prostitutes. telegraphers,
printers, and assorted down-and-outers who inhabited the grisly, vermin-infested
three-story establishment and whom, more than thirty years later, O'Neill
recalled as the best friends he ever had. Jimmy-the-Priest's, like New London,
attained permanent significance for O'Neill. He used it in 1920 as the setting
for the first act of Anna Christie and in 1939 as a background for The Iceman
Cometh. In addition, much of the first-hand knowledge of whores, gamblers, and
waterfront characters he displayed in other plays came from the half dozen
months he lived at Jimmy's.
Divorce and attempt to commit Suicide
On
October 11, 1912, the Court granted O'Neill the final divorce, decree from
Kathleen Jenkins. During the next three months, whenever Eugene was sober-even
momentarily, because of lack of funds-things looked so black to him that he
would have drunk anything, even varnish diluted with water, to make him forget
he was alive. He drank until he could no longer think or feel-and until even
drinking wasn't enough to blot out his misery. He began to wonder seriously if,
after all, it wouldn't be better for him to kill himself. And so, he went out
and bought veronal tablets, tossed down what he estimated to be a lethal dose, and went to sleep in his room. A couple of his friends found him there. guessed
his condition. and took him to Bellevue Hospital in an ambulance. He was
declared there out of danger. Seven years after this suicide attempt, in 1919,
O'Neill wrote a one-act play Exorcism embodying his experience of the suicide
attempt.
Zola and Dostoevsky
In August. 1912, when Eugene was nearly twenty-four, he became a reporter for the New London Telegraph. At this time be read Maupassant and Zola, getting more ammunition for a war against middle-class values. He was profoundly impressed by Zola's vision of the large biological, economic, and here biteforces that sweep individuals to destruction. By the end of November O'Neill was declared to be suffering from tuberculosis. He was admitted to the Gaylord Farm, where he found himself abruptly transformed from a man of action into a man of inaction. Finding himself no longer able to make a physical response of violence to everything in life that tormented him, he turned his fury inward and made the marvelous detection that he could be a creator instead of a destroyer. At this crucial, moment in his life he was tremendously influenced by two works he read: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Strindberg's recently translated play, The Dance of Death. O'Neill found that in writing he could escape from a hostile world. He could belong. He also found that writing was his life, that without writing as the focal point of his existence he had no life.
Baker's Drama Workshop
O'Neill
was discharged from the Gaylord Farm as an arrested case and left the
sanatorium on June 3, 1913. In September Eugene moved across Pequot Avenue to
live and board with a family named Rippon. During his stay with the ripping
family from September 1913. to March 1914, O'Neill completed at least six
one-act plays and a full-length one. On learning that he had been admitted to
Baker's 'English 47' class, O'Neill, late in September 1914, took a train for
Cambridge-- and to his goal of becoming "an artist or nothing".
Though O'Neill was chosen for Baker's advanced class the next year, he did not
return to Cambridge. Instead, in the fall of 1915, he headed for New York.
At Hell Hole
In
New York, Eugene O'Neill moved into a room at 38 Washington Square in Greenwich
Village. Greenwich Village was a good place for a drunken spree. In the years
just before the United States entered the war, the Village was famous for
radical ideas, violent soul-searching, and monumental egotism. Before long.
O’Neill knew all the Village saloons. But the most alluring one for O'Neill was
Wallace's Golden Swan bar, popularly known as the "Hell Hole". The
Hell Hole habitue who made the most searing impression on O'Neill was an
incredible man named Terry Carlin.
Provincetown
In
the spring of 1916, O'Neill headed for Provincetown, where he was finally to
find recognition for his talent. The summer of 1916 saw the production of Bound
East for Cardiff at the Wharf Theatre. Till the end of April 1917, O'Neill had
turned out four more plays-Ile, The Moon of the Caribes, The Long Voyage Home,
and In the Zone. By the end of May 1917, O'Neill was in New London, staying with
his family.
Second Marriage: Awards and Honours
O'Neill
married for the second time, a girl named Agnes Boulton, on April 12, 1918. On
February 3, 1920, the first production of an O'Neill play opened on Broadway
with Beyond the Horizon. On June 3, 1920, O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for this play. On August 10, 1920, O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, died.
Within the next three years, he completed seven long plays and took a hand in
the production of five of these, in addition to the two Gold and The Straw that had been completed earlier. On February 28, 1922, his mother died. On May
21,1922, the Pulitzer Prize was announced for Anna Christie. In February 1923,
O'Neill was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded
the gold medal for drama. On November 8. 1923. O'Neill's elder brother Jamie
died.
Litt. D. From Yale
O'Neill's
All God's Chillum Got Wings opened in the Provincetown Theatre on May 15, 1924.
On November 11, 1924, Longing Under the Elm tree unlocked at the Greenwich
Village Theatre. O'Neill received an honorary Litt. D. from Yale on June 23,
1926. The newly elevated Doctor of Letters arrived at his rented cabin at the
edge of one of the Belgrade Lakes in Maine on July 1, 1926, Carlotta Monterey,
the charming actress, was the house guest of Elizabeth Marbury, a neighbor of
O'Neill, that summer. Both of them met and O'Neill was attracted to her.
Third Marriage
Marco
Millions opened on January 9, 1928, at the Guild Theatre to a lukewarm
reception. Sometime before the opening of Strange Interlude on January 30,
1928, O'Neill had made up his mind to rosary Carlotta. In February of that year,
he went abroad secretly with Carlotta. They lived in England and France and
also went on an eastern voyage. On July 2, 1929, Agnes Boulton was granted the
divorce on grounds of desertion. O'Neill and Carlotta were married on July 22,
1929, in Paris. On May 17, 1931, they were back in New York.
At
the Height of His Career
O'Neill's
most ambitious play, Mourning Becomes Electra, opened on October 26, 1931. The
reviews of this play were extraordinarily enthusiastic. The production of this
play was, in a sense, the climax of O'Neill's career. He was to complete six
more plays, but only three of them were produced on Broadway in his lifetime.
And of the three, only the light-hearted and typical Ah, Wilderness! was an
unqualified critical and popular success. The production of Days Without End on
January 8, 1934, marked the beginning of a period of public decline for O'Neill
in the United States. By the end of 1934, he had determinedly retreated into
the past. Only periodically he visited New York.
Nobel Prize for Literature
On
November 12, 1936, O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In his
Nobel Prize receiving speech, he professed: I feel so deeply that it is not
only my work which is being honored but the work of all my colleagues in
America--that the Nobel Prize is a symbol of the coming of age of the American
theatre.
Days of Decline and Anguish
The
year 1937 had not begun auspiciously for O'Neill. From the beginning of this
year to the end of his life in 1956 he was more or less regularly in the hands
of doctors and at the mercy of drugs and medical regimens. In the summer of
1939, O'Neill had begun writing Long Day's Journey into Night, which was to
prove O'Neill's masterpiece. He was a spiritually, mentally, and physically
tormented man during the two years it took him to write this play. By the end
of 1940, O'Neill had finished the play, except for some final polishing.
Shocks
O'Neill,
who reached his fifty-fifth birthday in 1943 had been writing steadily for
thirty years. At this point in his life, he was hoarding an unproduced backlog
of four plays, as well as drafts of eight Cycle Plays. In addition, he had
notebooks filled with play ideas and outlines destined never to be written. As
he labored over A Moon for the Misbegotten in the early part of 1943, O'Neill
found it increasingly difficult to control the purely mechanical process of
writing. When he was finishing the play in the spring of that year, his already
taut nerves received another slaughter. On June 17, 1943, he read the news
that his daughter Oona (from his second wife, Agnes Boulton), who recently turned
eighteen, had married Charlie Chaplin, who was then fifty-four. O'Neill was so
infuriated that he disinherited her, along with Shane (her brother), and all
their issue.
Last Days
The
last O'Neill play to be produced on Broadway during his lifetime opened on
October 9, 1946. The play was The Iceman Cometh. It had a mixed reception. At
the end of July 1948, Carlotta found another new house for O'Neill in Marble
head Neck, about twenty-five miles from Boston. O'Neill, just past his sixtieth
birthday, moved into his new house in October 1948. After that, he shifted to
Shelton hotel.
Disease and Death
On
September 25, 1950, O'Neill was shocked to learn that Eugene Jr. had committed
suicide in Woodstock, New Jersey. The causes of his suicide were probably
disappointment in love and his failure as a classics teacher at Yale and
Princeton. On November 24, 1953, O'Neill became critically ill. He had shortness
of breath, a cough, and a high fever. The fever raged for three days. Once
during this time, O'Neill gave expression to his lifelong feeling of vagrancy
and disaffection: "Born in a hotel room--and Goddamn it - died in a hotel
room!" He died on November 27, 1953.