Arts and Letters

Before he reached his thirty-second birthday, Eugene O'Neill had established himself as the greatest of American dramatists. At that early age, by the extraordinary power of his writing, he had compelled such artistic progress as the American theatre had never known before and, I regret to say, has not known to any comparable degree in the years since dreadful illness condemned him to silence.

Although he had lived a violent life in his early years, and there was much violence in his plays, he was known to his friends as one of the mildest of men, quiet, shy, courteous, and charming. He was once a two-fisted drinker. I did not know him then, but I am told that when the whiskey was in him the mildness vanished, giving way to rampages worthy of his most turbulent Irish ancestors.

O'Neill himself told the story that one time long ago he made the mistake of occupying a seat at one of his own plays. A young lady sitting directly in front of him turned to her escort and said, "Did you know that the author of this play is a terrible drunkard? And, what's more, he's a drug addict!" Whereupon O'Neill leaned forward and said, "Excuse me, Miss—you are wrong there. I do not take drugs."

O'Neill was born in 1888 in a hotel on Broadway and 44th Street in the very heart of New York's theatrical district. This rather unusual birthplace was due to the fact that his father, James O'Neill, was an actor and a supremely popular one, who had such enormous success in a dramatization of Monte Cristo that for years, running into decades, he was not permitted to play much of anything else.

The O'Neill baby was given the middle name of "Gladstone"—just why, I do not know, but it is probable that this was a gesture of gratitude to the great Liberal Prime Minister who was then a champion of Home Rule for Ireland.

"My first seven years," O'Neill has written, "were spent mainly in the larger towns all over the United States—my mother accompanying my father on his road tours in Monte Cristo and repertoire; she was never an actress and had rather an aversion for the stage in general." But she was a good musician, and there was to be plenty of music in her son's plays.

The boy was educated in various Catholic schools and entered Princeton University, from which he was ejected for some mild misdemeanor in his freshman year. He then went to work, but not as a playwright.

He later sketched the next phase of his career in a letter to his friend, Barrett H. Clark:

My first job was secretary of a mail order firm in New York. In 1909, I went with a mining engineer on a gold prospecting trip to Central Honduras, Central America. At the end of six months I was invalided home—tropical malarial fever—no gold. After that I became assistant manager of a theatrical company, touring the Middle West. My first voyage to sea (as a deck-hand) followed—sixty-five days on a Norwegian barque, Boston to Buenos Aires. In Argentina I worked at various occupations—in the draughting department of the Westinghouse Electrical Company, in the wool house of a packing plant at La Plata, in the office of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, in Buenos Aires. Followed another voyage at sea, tending mules on a cattle steamer, Buenos Aires to Durban, South Africa, and return. After that a lengthy period of complete destitution in Buenos Aires—"on the beach"—terminated by my signing on as an ordinary seaman on a British tramp steamer bound home for New York. There, I lived at "Jimmy The Priest's"—a waterfront dive, with a back room where you could sleep with your head on the table if you bought a schooner of beer. Again I hung around the waterfront for a while. There, as in Buenos Aires, I picked up an occasional job on a mail boat.

O'Neill's last job as an able seaman was on an ocean liner between New York and Southampton. He then worked for a while as a newspaper reporter until his health broke down. He had, as he wrote later, "a touch of tuberculosis," and this changed his life, for it was during his long convalescence that he first began to suspect that his destiny was in writing for the theatre. His father—who, incidentally, never lavished money on his son—sent him to Harvard University for a year to study the drama at George Pierce Baker's "47 Workshop."

O'Neill's first successful one-act plays dealt, understandably, with the men who go down to the sea in ships. He called them "fo'c'sle" plays. They included Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Moon of the Caribbees, and The Long Voyage Home.

The first New York productions of the one-act plays were in a diminutive experimental theatre in Greenwich Village. They evoked enthusiastic praise from the more perceptive dramatic critics, who recognized that here was a new talent, a tremendous and an exciting one. The distance between O'Neill and all previous American dramatists was comparable to the distance between Sardou and Shaw.

I can never forget the first production of a full-length play by O'Neill—Beyond the Horizon. This was in 1920, and he was now uptown, on Broadway, where he was born and where he belonged.

Beyond the Horizon told of a man with the soul of a poet who longed for the sea and its far places, but he was stricken with tuberculosis, and could never escape from his land-locked farm. O'Neill poured a great deal of himself into this, and he wrote with a combination of earthy naturalism and surging, poetical passion—the perfect combination for anyone with the temerity to write for the theatre.

His plays poured forth during the next fifteen years—Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness, and many others.

Spiritually, he seemed to contract rather than expand in the climate of success. More and more he withdrew himself from the world, living in one retreat after another, always close to the sea. In 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first American dramatist and the only one to receive this honor. But he was too ill to go to Stockholm to accept the award. He suffered from a rare disease which produced a kind of palsy and ultimately crippled him.

O'Neill devoted his last fifteen years to a monumental cycle of nine plays which carried a family through the whole span of American history. The central theme, I am told, was the malevolent effect of possessions on their possessors. He refused to permit the production of any of the plays until the full cycle was completed to his satisfaction. I believe that he completed rough drafts of two of these plays—one of them was called "A Touch of the Poet"; he had a complete concept of each of the other seven, but he left only random notes on them.

Some years ago I asked O'Neill to autograph a volume of his plays for a library in Argentina. He wrote a long inscription, in which he expressed the doubt that there was a single park bench in Buenos Aires that had not on occasion served him as a bed. I am sure there were many times in his days of fame and affluence when he longed for those benches, and for the table in the back room at "Jimmy The Priest's"—on which he had laid his tormented head. The satisfactions of great achievement were not for him; he lived, in the last years of his life, with the memories of fierce striving.

But the great achievement remains. This Academy mourns the disablement and the death of our illustrious fellow-member, Eugene O'Neill, who made so gigantic a contribution to American arts and letters. He wrote tragedy and he lived tragedy, and he died too soon. But whenever today or in the future a fine play is written by an American playwright, the powerful influence of Eugene O'Neill is on it and something of the overflowing heart of Eugene O'Neill is in it.