The New York Times, July 27, 1982
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Whether they were events in his own life or in his plays, Eugene
O'Neill did not believe in accidents, and his first letter to the
critic and producer Kenneth Macgowan was animated by this sense of
the inevitable. ''I feel, somehow, as if I'd known you for a long
time,'' he wrote in 1921, ''and that we were fated for a real
friendship.'' The two men did, in fact, go on to become colleagues
in the theater, and over the years they would exchange dozens of
letters - letters now collected in this useful if somewhat limited
new volume published by the Yale University Press.
Since most of Macgowan's letters and telegrams to O'Neill have
disappeared, the correspondence tends to be curiously one-sided, and
many of O'Neill's notes are little more than routine exchanges about
finances and travel plans. Still, as the book's editors point out,
the letters - buttressed by Travis Bogard's judicious introductory
essays - illuminate ''the unique bond formed between these two men
with a common vision of what the American theater could and must
be,'' and as such provide a welcome addition to the existing canon
of work on America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright. If the
resonance of these letters is greater for the reader already
familiar with the details of O'Neill's story, they also serve as a
pleasant enough introduction to his life and works.
When O'Neill and Macgowan first met, they were still struggling
to articulate their respective careers, and their friendship would
help both to achieve clearer self-definition: O'Neill as a
playwright who would forge a native, tragic stage literature; and
Macgowan as a gifted producer, helping others to realize their
talents. Although he was the same age as O'Neill - both studied with
Prof. George Pierce Baker at Harvard -Macgowan quickly became a kind
of mentor for the playwright; his interest in theater esthetics,
masks and psychiatry would leave a lasting imprint on many of the
writer's early and middle plays.
Together with the stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, O'Neill and
Macgowan soon formed the famous Triumvirate that ran the
Experimental Theater at the Provincetown Playhouse during the early
1920's. The theater, in O'Neill's words, was to emphasize
''imaginative new interpretation'' and ''experimentation in
production,'' and in the course of three seasons it did stage
several critical and popular successes, including such O'Neill works
as ''Desire Under the Elms'' and ''The Great God Brown.''
By 1926, however, commercial considerations had increasingly come
to dictate the theater's policies, and after some friendly
squabbling, the Triumvirate disbanded. Following a difficult period
in which he floundered for direction, Macgowan went on to a
substantial career in Hollywood as a producer at RKO and Twenthieth
Century-Fox - he worked on such movies as ''Little Women,'' ''Life
Boat'' and ''Jane Eyre'' - and O'Neill soon found a new producer in
Lawrence Langner and the Theater Guild.
Even though their professional association ended, the two men
remained friends, and their correspondence begins to take on a more
casual, personal tone. Whereas the early letters concerning the
Experimental Theater are filled with lofty philosophical speculation
about the purpose of dramatic art and forgettable exchanges about
the merits of casting one actor over another, the later ones give a
sharper sense of the monumental passions and daily frustrations that
marked O'Neill's life.
While still married to Agnes, his second wife, O'Neill enlisted
Macgowan's aid in secretly sending roses to his new love, the
beautiful and tempestuous Carlotta Monterey, who would become his
''wife, mistress, mother, nurse.'' Letters written during a trip to
Europe with Carlotta are filled with exclamation points and informed
by a spirit of romantic infatuation (''I wander about foolish and
goggle-eyed with joy''); others, reviling Agnes and her friends,
reveal an uglier, more paranoid side (''if she refuses to get a
divorce I can eventually starve her into it'').
As O'Neill struggles to find language capable of expressing his
emotions, his letters depict, in a kind of shorthand, many of his
lasting concerns and preoccupations. His hypochondria, his bouts
with alcohol, his contempt for actors and, of course, his furious
idealism and determination to shun the middle course in favor of
finding something deeper and more real - these all are portrayed.
His last letters to Macgowan, however, become considerably
shorter and more cryptic. Geographical distance and diverging
concerns, after all, have separated the two friends: by the late
30's Macgowan was busy producing films; and O'Neill had isolated
himself at Tao House to work without distraction. A degenerative
nerve disorder would prevent the playwright from finishing his
long-planned cycle of 11 plays, and he spent his final days in a
Boston hotel room, seeing no one except his doctor and nurse and
Carlotta. He no doubt had intimations of his fate when he wrote
Macgowan in 1941: ''Production isn't that important. It can always
wait. Writing can't.''
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