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O'Neill
has been an irresistible subject for biographers since he first received
public attention in the early 1920s. At first he was known for being the
son of a famous father, educated in good schools, who had gone to sea
several times, had many love affairs, known celebrated radicals and
bohemians, prospected for gold, and lived the rough life in Honduras,
Buenos Aires, New York, and elsewhere. He could claim to know firsthand
something about the people he made his characters: sailors, gangsters,
down-and-outers, and others whose lives seemed at once exotic and
pertinent to playgoers of the time. While America in the 1920s danced,
drank, and prospered, O'Neill became famous for dark, serious, tragic
plays, plays that ran against the grain, plays that important critics
respected and argued about, plays that won frequent literary prizes (and
eventually the Nobel Prize). In spite of all this, O'Neill's plays were
sometimes immensely popular with more ordinary audiences and readers,
and O'Neill himself was among the best-known literary figures in the
world. When he went through an ugly divorce in the late 1920s, the
scandal made headlines east and west. After his death he attracted even more biographical attention, largely because of the posthumous publication of Long Day's Journey into Night, now his most famous work. It is a work that is explicitly and admittedly autobiographical, as we know from a private dedication written to his widow that she had printed with the text, written to her when he gave her the manuscript. In it he thanked her for the "love and tenderness . . . that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones." Tyrone was the name he gave the O'Neill family. James O'Neill and James O'Neill, Jr. (Jamie), his father and ten-year-older brother, he called James and Jamie Tyrone. Mary Ellen Quinlan O'Neill (called Ella O'Neill) became Mary Tyrone. To himself he gave the name of a third O'Neill son, Edmund, who had died in childhood before the future playwright was born. In the play he told the story of his mother's long struggle with morphine addiction and his father's lost dream of being a great Shakespearean actor (rather than the romantic idol he was), and O'Neill also told something of his and his brother's wild youthful lives. Once he had written the play (in 1940-1941), O'Neill allowed fewer than half a dozen people to read it. He believed it to be his finest work and had every reason to assume that it would bring money and honor. Yet a lifelong passion for privacy led him to conceal the play. With evident ambivalence, he had the manuscript sealed away in the vaults of his publisher, Random House. Notarized and countersigned instructions ensured that it was never to be performed, and not to be published until at least twenty-five years after his death, an instruction he repeated in his will. This, he told various people, was to protect living relatives and safeguard the memory of the O'Neills in the minds of people who might survive him. Eugene O'Neill was at once the most tireless and the most secretive of autobiographers. |
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The first major biography, O'Neill, by Arthur and Barbara
Gelb (1962), corrected numerous errors that had been passed on from one
biographer to another since
the 1920s; they added impressions from interviews with numerous friends
of the playwright and included a great deal of information about O'Neill
and his times. The Gelbs were the first to present generally accurate
details about Ella O'Neill's morphine addiction, and their sense of
Eugene's life still seems fundamentally sound. The
late Louis Sheaffer, who began work in the mid-1950s, wrote an
outstanding two-volume biography, O'Neill, Son and Playwright
(1968) and O'Neill, Son and Artist (1973). He conducted
exhaustive interviews with hundreds of people and formed lifelong
friendships with many of O'Neill's relatives and friends. In the
process, he corrected errors and uncovered many additional facts; he
deepened our knowledge of the playwright. Sheaffer's has been considered
a biography that will never be superseded, because of the richness of
detail it gives about the man, his friends, and his circumstances.
Sheaffer's copious collection of interview notes, photos, personal
letters, newspaper clippings, and other documents, filling numerous file
boxes, now reposes in the Sheaffer-O'Neill Collection at the Shain
Library at Connecticut College in New London, O'Neill's hometown.
Exhaustive as his thirteen-hundred-page work was, Sheaffer once noted
that his files contained enough information for two more volumes about
O'Neill. And now the Gelbs, working with their own sources as well as
Sheaffer's, are said to be nearly finished with a three-volume,
twenty-four-hundred-page expansion of their biography. A
further commentator on O'Neill's life must be mentioned, the
psychoanalyst James W. Hamilton, who published three fine essays in
1975, 1976, and 1979. They are among the very few analytic works before
the present biography to approach O'Neill's life from the standpoint of
modern psychoanalytic theory. When
work on the present biography began in the mid-1970s, the author, was a
professor of literature and a research candidate beginning nearly nine
years of academic and clinical training in psychoanalysis at the Seattle
Psychoanalytic Institute. At the time, a few people who had known
O'Neill were still alive (some are still). A decision was made to avoid
attempting to interview any of them, on the grounds that personal
accounts by witnesses might seem more vivid than the published testimony
of the dead and so might bring additional sources of bias to the
project. As it happened, Sheaffer passed away in 1993, and his papers,
including very extensive
interview notes, became available to scholars. On the evidence of his
notes, Sheaffer was a remarkably perceptive and empathic interviewer.
In nearly all cases where I quote or refer to Sheaffer's published
opinions or impressions, I have examined the relevant interview notes
and other documents. In some cases I have used material in the notes
that did not find its way into his published volumes and have indicated
such instances by the parenthetical phrase "(LS papers)." In a
certain sense, Sheaffer inevitably became a "character" in
this narrative, for the use of his published and unpublished work
necessitated examination of his conclusions, impressions, and
interactions with witnesses. At
least five friends of the young Eugene died between 1913 and 1919, three
(or possibly four) of them by suicide. During this period O'Neill was
teaching himself to write plays and was gradually achieving a belated
independence from his family. Nothing was harder for him than accepting
the losses and mourning his dead. Early difficulties in his life,
especially his mother's morphine addiction, greatly affected Eugene's
growth toward autonomy and his ability to mourn when death claimed close
friends and members of his family. Just
as he had begun to establish his independence, around 1919-1920, a
series of new losses beset him. He witnessed his father's prolonged,
painful illness and death. Eighteen months later, his
mother--youthful-looking and much younger than her husband--who had been
free from her morphine addiction for eight years, died of a brain tumor.
At once, Jamie O'Neill, Eugene's older brother, determined to drink
himself to death, something he managed to do in less than two years.
O'Neill lost all the members of his parental family in just over three
years. It seems obvious that such a concatenation of losses would
greatly affect someone of O'Neill's temperament and background. Yet the
losses and their implications have been little noticed and less
understood by biographers. The thesis presented in this biography is
that O'Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning. From
those terrible days forward, O'Neill was obsessed with his losses, and
with the process of mourning. Unable to let the dead remain dead, he
showed his preoccupation in everything he did and especially in
everything he wrote. He peopled his plays of the 1920s with characters
haunted by the dead, like Eben Cabot of Desire Under the Elms,
who speaks daily to his long-dead mother. Like their creator, Nina Leeds
and Charley Marsden of Strange Interlude (1926-1927) can neither finish
mourning nor cease repeating with others the relationships they had with
the dead. The first character O'Neill created who could even attempt to
confront her dead was Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra
(1929-1931). At the very end of the play, Lavinia has herself sealed in
the family home, determined to remain there until she has looked her
dead in the face and come to know them and her relations with them. Such
is the "work" of mourning, as psychoanalysis calls it, and
such is the task O'Neill set for himself. O'Neill had several encounters
with psychoanalysts in the 1920s, and in various remarks he made it
clear that he thought of his playwriting as a form of
self-psychoanalysis. Shortly after creating Lavinia, O'Neill himself
turned inward and ceased to write for immediate production or
publication. At this time, also, his health started to break down. He
began to experience episodes of profound depression that he told his son
seemed to him different from the melancholy he had always known. At the
same time, a nameless, idiopathic neurological process, which caused a
debilitating tremor, increasingly afflicted him. As will be seen later,
the depression and the tremor were almost certainly related. During
this time O'Neill also suffered from a succession of more common
ailments. Following an ordinary attack of appendicitis in 1937 and an
apparently successful appendectomy, he nearly died of peritonitis and
was three months in the hospital recovering. He was in bed when the
Swedish consul brought him the Nobel Prize medal and read a presentation
speech. The
tremor would eventually make impossible the physical act of writing and
later affect his ability to walk or speak or swallow. Despite being
often sick from various illnesses, he worked from 1935 to 1939 on a vast
series of interrelated plays known as the Cycle, in which he set out to
give an account of American economic and political history beginning in
1755 and ending in 1932. He evidently completed drafts of as many as six
or seven of the plays, only one of which survives in the original form.
If the survivor, More Stately Mansions, is any indication, the
account of American history would have been filled with ghosts of the
O'Neills, ghosts studied in almost unbearably intimate detail. Writing Mansions
and the others was O'Neill's
way of completing the work of mourning. In
1939, almost casually, O'Neill set aside the Cycle and in the next three
years wrote three plays unlike anything he had written before. These
were The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and
Hughie. There would be two more plays before illness made further
writing impossible--a revision of the Cycle play A Touch of the Poet
and A Moon for the Misbegotten. In these plays O'Neill mourned
his dead and moved beyond mourning and tragedy to that remote dramatic
continent discovered by Sophocles at the end of his working life, when
he wrote Oedipus at Colonos, or by Shakespeare when he composed The
Winter's Tale. The growth of O'Neill's artistic powers from the best
plays he wrote in the 1920s to the plays of the late 1930s and early
1940s was such that critics and the public only now seem gradually to
realize how very remarkable the late achievements are. O'Neill's finest
plays were written after he had received the Nobel Prize. O'Neill
fashioned plays from his circumstances that interpreted his own life and
the lives of those close to him. Writing plays allowed O'Neill to find
in his life an aesthetic coherence resembling that which he gave the
materials of his plays. O'Neill probably did not often recognize the
internal psychological structures gradually evolving in himself, and he
surely had in mind no general aim or plan. But by dint of extraordinary
commitment to his work and daily writing stints, he brought himself,
little by little, into harmony with events. More than simply developing
his talents, O'Neill created a life in which he became congruent with
his circumstances. To
put the matter in different terms, the terms of this biography, O'Neill
found a way to use the writing of plays as a form of
self-psychoanalysis. The analysis was successful to the extent that it
allowed him to mourn his dead and to create in his last plays work that
must have come very close to fulfilling even so large a talent as his. It
remains to say a little about psychoanalytic object relations theory,
the aspect of psychoanalysis most pertinent to understanding mourning.
To put it simply, object relations theory has to do with the gradual
process by which people grow from a state of almost total dependency in
infancy to whatever degree of autonomy they reach in later
life. Mourning, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is the
process of separating one's mental images of oneself from one's mental
representations of the lost person. Because the images referred to are
as much unconscious as conscious, the work of separating
self-representations from representations of the dead can never be
straightforward and always partly escapes intellectual control. The
study of such images and their vicissitudes is called object relations
theory. The word object is taken from traditional philosophical categories,
subject and object distinguishing me from not-me. It is
meant neither to imply coldness toward the other nor to reduce the
other's personhood. Distinguishing the me from the not-me is one of the
necessary achievements of human development in the first twenty or
thirty years of life. In
our early lives, our images of ourselves are often fused with our images
of our parents; that is, as children we often cannot distinguish our
internal, intuitive sense of self from our intuitive interpretations of
a parent. Out of these images of self and others, identity forms itself.
In optimal circumstances, the representations enlarge and grow more
complex with new experiences and impressions of our parents. Each new
experience may add something to what we know of the parent and may
complicate our sense of who and what the parent may be as a person. The
word object does not refer to a person but to an internal
representation, a subjective interpretation of a person by a child, a
person whose view of the world little resembles an adult's perspective.
An infant will not immediately connect various discrete images of
nursing with the idea "mother" before having reached a certain
developmental stage. In passing through the first years, the child
becomes increasingly skilled at assimilating and integrating the various
experiences out of which parental images are formed. The child's growing
ability to create complex parental images is at the center of
development toward autonomy. The more integrated the interpretations,
the less the child continues to need its parents, and the closer it is
to being ready for unsheltered experience. Anything that inhibits
development prolongs the period of dependency. All
kinds of events may inhibit development, with varying consequences. The
death of a parent generally has a powerful effect on a dependent child.
The child's real experience of the parent ceases with the death, and as
a consequence the child cannot continue to modify its
internal images of the parent. The child may continue to develop
its power to interpret and integrate experience, but it will be partly
cut off from its image of the lost parent. The child's internal sense of
the relation between itself and the parent is likely to remain unchanged
after the loss, at least until the mourner approaches emotional
autonomy. If
the unconscious childhood impression of the lost parent is ever to
change, and if mourning for the parent is ever to be completed or
resolved, the bereaved will probably have to make a conscious and
deliberate effort to reconstruct the old relationship. The
"work" of mourning is
especially complicated when it occurs before one is independent.
One must eventually try to reimagine the past from the standpoint of one
who is no longer dependent, to allow old images to be seen from a
present point of view. One can eventually change one's understanding of
the dead: the parent who abandons a needy child becomes a particular
person who died leaving a dependent child. To relinquish the old image,
one must, among other things, acknowledge one's past and current
dependency and understand the particulars of one's needs. The mourner
must constantly struggle against the wish to deny the loss and the
attendant grief. The
phenomenon of blaming the person who died for abandoning the survivor is
a common one. If the bereaved is still arguing with the lost person, he
or she in effect denies that the loss has taken place. Fighting with the
dead is made simpler when the lost person lives exclusively "in
one's head," rather than partly in the outside world. Even so, a
death may not be the hardest loss to understand or resolve, simply
because it is something we know to be universal and fundamental that
forces the separation. Not all losses result from death. One cannot
blame death when the lost person remains alive, as in the case of a loss
through divorce. Eugene's
problem was still more difficult. He lost his mother when he was
fourteen, neither to death nor to a divorce, but to the discovery of her
addiction. It reduced and simplified the images he was forming of her.
It led him to substitute unspoken code words like weak or fragile
or ill or evil for the more complex representations of a
highly intelligent adolescent struggling toward understanding. The
discovery caused him to place his relationship with his mother partly in
suspension, for she could not stand the rough and tumble of reciprocity
with an adolescent, and he could not stand the guilt of knowing his
power to harm her. The
discovery altered Eugene's relations not only with his mother but with
the entire environment in which he was trying to grow up. One of the
basic necessities for growing up is a sense of safety. A child feels
safe when it knows that whatever it does, others in the world will not
be permanently harmed, nor will the child have to suffer the worst
consequences of its aggression. The sense of safety coexists in uneasy
alliance with what is called childhood omnipotence, a subjective belief
in the power of one's thoughts to alter the world that expresses itself
in, say, a little boy's cockiness or in a teenager's risk-taking. One
aspect of the belief in the omnipotence of one's thoughts is that it
allows one to acquire gradually, rather than too quickly, the knowledge
that reality is largely indifferent to the needs and wishes of a person
who (in reality) is small and powerless. Whatever sense of safety Eugene
may have felt before he knew of his mother's addiction he lost
afterward. There was the realistic concern, any time his mother was free
from the morphine, that an upset in the family might send her back to
the drug. An
even more profound loss than the loss of the sense of safety occurred
with the discovery of her addiction, and that was the knowledge that
simply by being born he had caused her addiction and permanently changed
her life and the lives of his father and brother. There is such a thing
as too great a feeling of childhood omnipotence, the consequence of
which may be inhibitions, anxiety, and neuroses. Such was Eugene's
situation when he learned of his mother's addiction. He lost himself and
his parents and then spent the rest of his life recovering them in order
to be independent. The
process of transformation that leads from dependency to individuation
and autonomy involves a host of issues inescapable in the age of
skepticism. The medium of transformation for O'Neill was his writing,
the work that occupied most of his time from 1913 until 1943. O'Neill
remarked more than once, with as much sincerity as irony, that writing
was his vacation from living or that living was something he endured in
order to write. It was a complaint about poor health, and it turned
post-Puritan and post-Victorian attitudes toward work topsy-turvy. But
the remark also implied that the process working gave the playwright
enough satisfaction and happiness to compensate for anything else life
might do to him. O'Neill had something like an Aristotelian attitude
toward happiness, which he thought
of not only as moments of pleasure, but as a continual pursuit of arete,
the complex notion of "excellence," the search for which was
assumed to lead to a deeper happiness. (It was arete that Jefferson
meant by "the pursuit of happiness.") Whatever happiness
O'Neill may have reached, the pursuit gave coherence to his life. |
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