Gene woke up and read for awhile, and then said he’d like the soup, but another drink first. He finished one Saturday Evening Post and began another, and about four o’clock he had another drink and read again. . . . The doctor had told me to give him a sleeping pill but Gene said wryly that the Saturday Evening Post was his narcotic.¹

The picture of O’Neill fogged in with a hangover and the Saturday Evening Post recurs with depressing frequency in the account his second wife has provided of their years together in 1918 and 1919. Agnes Boulton says little about her husband’s writing, aside from noting that when he was sober he locked himself away and wrote for long hours, but her memoir implies that at this time he wrote not so much because he was impelled by a strong creative urge as because he found in writing an excuse for solitude. Certainly what he wrote suggests that after the considerable achievement of the Glencairn plays his career had lost its stability and its power of progression and had come instead to a doldrums from which he could not free himself.

Early in 1918, carried forward by the creative momentum of the previous year’s work, he completed Beyond the Horizon, but thereafter pecked at a group of relatively unimportant one-act plays and at drafts of The Straw and Chris Christopherson. Perhaps led by his wife’s small success as a writer of pulp fiction, he also turned his hand to two straight commercial ventures.

One of the latter, a short story entitled S.O.S., was evidently suggested by his reading of the wartime fiction of the Saturday Evening Post, and in quality is about equal to what the magazine was then publishing. The tale is an adaptation of his Warnings, and tells of John Lathrop whose marriage is endangered when he loses his job as a telegrapher. He takes a position as a wireless operator on a freighter traveling between New York and Buenos Aires. As in the play, John becomes deaf and fails to hear the warnings radioed to the ship—in this instance of a German raider engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare* off the South American coast. His ship is captured and sunk after the freighter’s crew has been transferred to the raider. John’s hearing is unexpectedly restored when the raider’s guns fire at another ship. Still pretending to be deaf, he stabs the German wireless operator and radios the ship’s position to shore. The raider is captured, but not before the Germans discover what John has done and execute him. John is hailed a hero and his wife is granted a government pension.