By Women Possessed Read online

  “Everyone table-hopped,” Day recalled many years later. “We were very happy and very young.” But she had a hidden side, as unfathomable and untouchable as O’Neill’s own dark reserve, which perhaps explained their mutual attraction.

  Day’s parents were Protestant, but she felt a mystical tug toward the Catholic Church. Her “first real link to Catholicism,” she later acknowledged, was O’Neill’s drunken recitation in the Hell Hole of “The Hound of Heaven” by the ardently Catholic poet Francis Thompson. She was fascinated by O’Neill’s own religious ambivalence; it seemed to her that the further O’Neill withdrew from his Catholic roots, the more keenly he felt both the terror and exhilaration of his flight.

  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

  Of my own mind. . . .

  Thus begins the Thompson poem, of which O’Neill had memorized all 183 lines. The idea of God’s pursuit fascinated Dorothy Day; someday, she knew, she would have to pause in her own flight. “I used to ask Gene to recite it over again,” she said. “He didn’t need any urging.”

  After a night spent boisterously in the Hell Hole, Dorothy Day often would find herself drawn to St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue. There, in the icy dawn, possessing scant knowledge of the tenets of Catholicism, she would kneel during early-morning Mass.

  Following Holladay’s death, Day fled the Village and threw herself into a nursing career. Very probably it was Day’s precipitous action that suggested O’Neill’s depiction, in Strange Interlude, of Nina Leeds’s sudden, frenzied nursing career as expiation for her guilt over her fiancé’s death.

  A decade later, Day converted to Catholicism and eventually became the selfless founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. At her mission house in lower Manhattan, the destitute men and women who lined up daily to be fed and clothed would grasp at her hand, attempting to kiss it with the reverence tendered a saint.

  Four years after O’Neill’s death in 1953, Day reflected at the mission on the O’Neill she knew. “Gene was single-minded in his objective,” she said. “Nothing could distract him. Nothing could devour him. In that sense there was a kind of purity in him. He was not attracted to evil, but to darkness. He was absorbed by death and darkness.

  “One day recently when I was saying the rosary, I noticed a candle dripping, and I was suddenly reminded of a line from ‘The Hound of Heaven’—‘Life’s dripping taper.’ It made me think of Gene. I pray for him even now.” Referring to a fundamental principle of Christian doctrine that holds that with an eternal God there is no past, present, or future, Day concluded, “There is no time with God. All the prayers said for [O’Neill] after his death would be of avail at the moment of his death. I pray that Gene turns to the light.”

  • • •

  WHEN O’NEILL FINALLY roused himself from his weeklong drunk at the end of January 1918, he had come to a decision. His colleagues at the Playwrights’ Theatre quietly congratulated themselves when he packed his bags and left for Provincetown. What startled many of them was that he took Agnes with him.

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  A different Gene” was how Agnes Boulton remembered the brooding lover who hurried her off to Provincetown that frigid winter of 1918. During their first week together in February, she found her ardor deepening and she was convinced O’Neill now returned her love in kind. She was enraptured by his “charm,” “his expressive great dark eyes”; never had she “seen or touched such beautiful hair.”

  With slender means and little concern for creature comforts, Agnes and O’Neill lived randomly in the twin studios that John Francis had prepared for them. Francis was a pushover when it came to his tenants, many of whom, like O’Neill, were artists living on the edge of poverty. Himself the uneducated son of a Portuguese fisherman, Francis respected their creative strivings and often allowed them to put off paying their rent for months. O’Neill, who had rented from him in the past, was among his favorite charities.

  In his letter reserving a studio, O’Neill had asked if it could be adequately heated. Francis’s reply—spontaneous, misspelled, ungrammatical, and generous—was a defining example of the man’s character: “If the war keeps on I be lucky to have a shirt to put on anyway you can take the stove I have had to do with the one in the front shop to save fuel . . . you will have no trouble to get small quantities of coal and wood the same you can have the studio for $75. to Dec 31 this year and I will pay the water bill only be careful and report any leak.” Francis threw in the adjacent studio at no extra cost.

  Agnes was a casual housekeeper. She sometimes cooked, but many of their meals were spooned out of cans. That didn’t trouble O’Neill, who never had lived or dined in a well-run home. Trooping from town to town with his actor-father’s company for the first seven years of his life, he had learned to swallow third-rate food in third-rate hotels—and those meals had been Lucullan compared with the barely edible sailor’s chow of his seafaring days.

  Even when his ceaselessly touring parents sheltered him during summer respites in their New London cottage, his mother often was too muddled to cope with household demands and the O’Neills frequently took their meals at a nearby boardinghouse.

  Domestic issues aside, the moody, searching twenty-nine-year-old O’Neill and the eager, romantic twenty-five-year-old Agnes were in perfect accord. Sharing their dreams, they swore to live a life dedicated to creativity and mutual devotion—just the two of them, as Agnes pictured it, “in a world of our own.” It would be a life that precluded children.

  “As for my little girl,” recalled Agnes, “so preposterous would have been the idea of my poet-genius with a child around that I don’t think the idea even occurred to me.” And as for her poet-genius, it did not occur to him until months later to mention that he had a six-year-old son from his brief marriage to Kathleen Jenkins; the boy was being raised on Long Island by Kathleen and her second husband.

  O’Neill had never seen his child, he told Agnes, and probably never would. He didn’t understand children and couldn’t relate to them, he said. Agnes, having impulsively agreed to a childless marriage with O’Neill, flippantly told a friend who asked if they planned to have children that probably all they would have was a book.

  • • •

  WHILE SUPPORTIVE OF O’Neill’s talent—here at the dawn of his career—Agnes was not overawed by his growing reputation. Quietly, she regarded her own budding career as equally important. But she was enough in love to put her writing second for the time being and to coddle her lover’s capricious artistic temperament, which—even away from his boozing cronies in the Village—included the occasional drinking binge. Agnes endured these binges patiently, always standing by to help him taper off into sobriety when he crashed.

  O’Neill, who did his writing in the open upstairs loft of his studio, seemed able to concentrate, even with Agnes moving about below to cook (when she would). She looked forward to their evenings, when O’Neill would read to her from the evolving Beyond the Horizon. He invited her comments about the rivalry between the play’s two brothers, Robert and Andrew Mayo: Robert the idealistic dreamer, Andrew the realist lured by material gain—both of them in love with Ruth Atkins, the sweet, unambitious girl next door.

  O’Neill would query her. Did Agnes “get” what he was after? Did she understand that he was attempting to create “a simon-pure uncompromising American tragedy?” She thought she did. However, with her lack of theater background, she couldn’t hope to understand the enormity of the breakthrough O’Neill was striving for, nor did she begin to grasp the huge difference between O’Neill’s concept of what a play should be and that of any other contemporary American playwright.

  Writing more like a novelist than a playwright, he was fulfilling his long-held ambition to be the embodiment of indigenous American stage tragedy—as Dreiser embodied the tragic A
merican novel. O’Neill summarized Beyond as “the tragedy of the man who looks over the horizon, who longs with his whole soul to depart on the quest, but whom destiny confines to a place and a task that are not his.”

  While there are unmistakable traces in Beyond of O’Neill’s recent, painful triangular entanglement with the duplicitous Louise Bryant and his brotherly friend John Reed, he chose to describe the play’s genesis at a more distant remove. In a lengthy and self-confident letter published in The New York Times, he wrote that the idea for the play sprang from the “real life” experience of his voyage on the British tramp steamer Ikalis, on which, as an ordinary seaman, he returned to New York from his perilous adventure in Buenos Aires in March 1911. On board was a Norwegian seaman whom he befriended.

  • • •

  THE NORWEGIAN OFTEN spoke of his regret at trading the security of the farm where he was raised for the uncertain life of the sea. But, said O’Neill, the man was “a bred-in-the-bone child of the sea if there ever was one.” With his feet on the plunging deck he was planted like a natural growth in what was “good clean earth” to him. Although he was

  in perfect harmony with his environment . . . he cursed the sea and the life it had led him—affectionately. He loved to hold forth on what a fool he had been to leave the farm. . . . A man on his own farm was his own boss. He didn’t have to eat rotten grub, [nor did he] have to wait for the end of a long voyage for a payday and a good drunk.

  But what has this intensely-to-be-envied squarehead got to do with Beyond the Horizon you will ask? Just this: at exactly the right moment, when I was floundering about in the maze of the novel-play, he turned up in my memory.

  I thought, “What if he had stayed on the farm with his instincts? What would have happened?” But I realized at once he never would have stayed, not even if he had saddled himself with the wife and kids. It amused him to pretend he craved the farm. . . . As well expect a seagull to remain in a barnyard—for ethical reasons.

  And from that point I started to think of a more intellectual, civilized type . . . a man who would have my Norwegian’s inborn craving for the sea’s unrest, only to him it would be conscious . . . intellectually diluted into vague, intangible wanderlust.

  His powers of resistance, both moral and physical, would also probably be correspondingly watered. He would throw away his instinctive dream and accept the thralldom of the farm for—why, for almost any little poetical craving—the romance of sex, say.

  And so, concluded O’Neill, “Robert Mayo was born, and developed from that beginning,” as was Ruth and the rest of the play’s characters, and “finally the complete play.”

  Understandably, O’Neill didn’t mention his love affair with Louise Bryant as a significant impetus for the play’s love triangle; but, like many a novelist, he instinctively blended the intimate events of his personal and fantasy life; his objective, assimilated experiences; and his psychological insights; in order to arrive at the existential plot for Beyond the Horizon.

  In the play, Robert is the brother who wins Ruth, sacrificing his dream of going to sea, trapping himself on his father’s farm, segueing into what is ultimately a loveless marriage, and losing his soul. Andrew, in his stead—although he loves the farm—sails away beyond the horizon to achieve material success, but fails to appreciate the beauty and romance surrounding his adventure. Ruth, realizing she chose the wrong man, sinks into a numb acceptance of her fate. As is inevitable in O’Neill’s tragic view, all of their dreams, in the end, have been thwarted.

  His Robert Mayo is a symbolic version of himself; as for Andrew Mayo and Ruth Atkins, although they embody few if any of the characteristics of John Reed or Louise Bryant, they symbolically serve to complete the play’s tragic triangle.

  Agnes must have been aware of the source from which her poet-genius was drawing inspiration; it was all too obvious he was reliving his recent passion for his brotherly friend’s woman—and for his own “little poetical craving” for “the romance of sex.” From the evidence in her memoir, however, Agnes was convinced she had by now replaced Louise in O’Neill’s heart, and she did not dream it was Louise for whom he might still be pining.

  • • •

  AGNES SOON LEARNED her mistake.

  Louise Bryant returned from Russia on February 18, 1918, shortly after Agnes and O’Neill had left Greenwich Village. Louise arrived in New York in a flurry of publicity and without Reed. Reports had reached the United States that Reed had accepted a minor post in the new Bolshevik regime. Louise knew that Reed, momentarily swept up in the Communist vision of revolutionary reform, had acted impulsively, thereby risking indictment for treason upon his return home. She refused to answer reporters’ questions about Reed, telling them instead that she was planning to write a book about her own firsthand experiences.

  From her friends in Greenwich Village, she soon learned about O’Neill’s liaison with Agnes and, although preoccupied with her book and her newfound celebrity, she launched an attempt to reclaim him.

  At the end of February, a letter arrived for O’Neill in Provincetown. Louise wrote that she must see him at once—this according to Agnes, to whom O’Neill showed the letter. Louise wrote she’d “crossed three thousand miles of frozen steppes to come back to her lover.”

  Again according to Agnes, Louise assured O’Neill that her love for him would never change, and she dismissed the rumor that he had “picked up some girl in the Village and become involved.” But, Louise argued in her next letter, there was no use writing letters; she had to see him. With glib impudence, she protested it was “all a misunderstanding” and that her going to Russia with Reed did not mean she’d severed her relationship with O’Neill.

  Agnes remembered she was trembling when she finished reading the letter. What did Gene intend to do? she demanded. Assuming an air of woe, but relishing the drama of it all, O’Neill replied, “I can’t let her suffer like this. I can’t do this to her—now!” He’d have to see Louise. “See her!” Agnes retorted in disbelief.

  O’Neill took nearly two weeks to consider his situation, apparently not that unwilling, after all, to let Louise suffer—and leaving Agnes in suspense as well. And then he equivocated; perhaps he would go to New York to see Louise: it was the least he could do in view of her own journey of “three thousand miles of frozen steppes” to see him.

  “She knew that phrase would get you,” Agnes jeered, unnerved by the “surety” expressed in Louise’s letter and frightened by what she perceived as Louise’s hold over O’Neill. Agnes had begun to suspect that O’Neill liked to suffer.

  She was tormented by the image of Louise in a photograph that O’Neill had shown her, a photo depicting “this menacing and determined hussy . . . with legs in tight riding breeches spread apart, hands dug in the pockets of a smart jacket . . . a gamin cap rakishly on her head, a provocative smile on her lips.” She was, according to Agnes, O’Neill’s vision of the “mythical symbol of the great old and mystic Irish legends.”

  In the first of four letters O’Neill wrote to Louise after her return from Russia, he nakedly revealed the depth of his painful love for her; they were letters he knew risked the wreckage of his romance with Agnes.

  “I don’t know whether I shall come to New York or not,” he wrote on March 3. His hesitation sprang less from a sense of loyalty to Agnes than from some sort of fuzzy ethical quibble regarding his friendship for Reed. He’d been disturbed by recent rumors that Louise had gone to Russia as Reed’s wife. But perhaps he was also toying with her.

  “I want to see you as much as you do me,” he wrote. “But—I don’t want to see you if you are Mrs. John Reed.”

  Apparently Louise had not told O’Neill she had secretly married Reed on November 9, 1916; about to undergo a life-threatening kidney operation, Reed had told Louise, “I might die . . . and I want you to have everything I’ve got.”

  After berating Louise fo
r having hidden her marriage to Reed, O’Neill rambled on, sounding by turns loving and angry, compassionate and impatient, defiant and despondent, self-pitying and self-aggrandizing—but mostly hurt and bewildered and, not infrequently, adolescent and, possibly, drunk.

  “How do I think I would act if I should see you?” he began, presumably in answer to Louise’s query. “I think I would want to say a lot of things—and find no words; I would want to kiss you—and dare not; would want to weep—and find my eyes had become incapable of tears; would look into your eyes furtively—and be afraid; and I would feel very sad, and very humble, and very dirty!”

  O’Neill went on to toss Louise a sulfurous rejoinder to what must have been a self-congratulatory digression about her reportage from Russia, describing the human suffering she had witnessed and, by implication, belittling O’Neill’s narrow, self-centered artistic strivings. He declined to applaud the depth of her compassion.

  “Perhaps,” he wrote, “if I had seen Russia in the throes as you have, I might be aroused to a love for the human race. . . .

  “As it is humanity inspires me only with loathing. Everything over here is bombastic cant and cheap sentimentality. I hate it, and my only salvation lies in my ability to sink into myself. . . .” The “reality of this life,” he wrote, was “only a pitiful illusion.”

  After additional caustic comments about life in general, O’Neill returned to his personal dilemma: “If you had only come sooner—a month, two months sooner! But you didn’t, or couldn’t.” They had both “waited too long,” he wrote, “and now everything we waited for is here—an impossible possibility!”

  O’Neill went on to disparage most of his Greenwich Village friends for having gossiped to him and Louise about each other, and he gave Louise a long-winded explanation-cum-self-exoneration of his drunkenness and his various “disgusting one-night amours” since her departure—and before meeting Agnes.