Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O'Neill and Agnes Boulton (review)

With Another Part of a Long Story, William Davies King offers the first considered account of the marriage between Eugene O'Neill and the writer Agnes Boulton, which lasted over a decade and produced two children. King illustrates how Boulton has been misrepresented in biographies of O'Neill, not to mention dismissed with regard to her own life and literary achievements. Her memoir about her life with O'Neill, Part of a Long Story, from which King takes his title, was criticized mainly because it contradicted popular understandings of the playwright. Published in 1958, two years after O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night received its posthumous, critically heralded premiere, Boulton's book painted a very different portrait of a young O'Neill. Most critics rejected her version, and a few even denounced the book as a cheap attempt to exploit the playwright's death. King effectively refutes this criticism and identifies the ways in which Boulton was a successful writer in her own right. He writes,

It would be silly to pretend that her life demands a telling the way his does. And yet it is somehow because she did not accumulate that mantle of literary history herself, because she has never been a topic of biographical interest except in relation to O'Neill, and because it seems dubious, that it ought to be done.

(20)

King's reclamation of Boulton is valuable, in part because of her talents but also because, in closely examining her life, King provides significant insight into some of the particular challenges facing a liberated woman writer in the early twentieth century.

At the same time, the book is devoted equally to O'Neill and his writing over the course of his relationship with Boulton. The chapters are organized chronologically, examining biographical developments alongside the literary output of the two authors. King emphasizes that Boulton and O'Neill addressed marriage in stories and plays while self-consciously reflecting on the practice and institution in their life together. In the mid-1920s, for instance, O'Neill and Boulton participated in the pioneering study A Research in Marriage, conducted by neurologist Dr. Gilbert Hamilton. Even as O'Neill responded to the study's lengthy questionnaire on marriage, he was producing drama on the subject. As King's subtitle suggests, he reads all of O'Neill and Boulton's literary work (as well as diaries and correspondence) for information about the marriage. This approach to the literature is most instructive when the pair actually worked on something together, as was the case with the revision of a play O'Neill first wrote in 1917 entitled The Guilty One and Beyond the Horizon (1920). Here, King provides evidence of an exchange between the couple, written on and about a specific text.

Literary collaboration of any kind between O'Neill and Boulton was unusual, however, so King often pursues a kind of conjectural detective work in their drama and fiction. Analysing the earlier years when Boulton was most productive, for example, King describes her stories in great detail in the hunt for clues about her life. In one instance, he places parenthetical queries beside the names of fictional characters in her story (is X the real-life counterpart? Or is Y?), which underscores how speculative this endeavour is (61). Toward the end of the book, King speculates in a different fashion: "Doing some aggressive editorial work," King changes the notes that Boulton wrote on the occasion of O'Neill's death in order to create improved, "lovely lines" of poetry (210). Doing so allows him to make a perfectly feasible connection to a poem O'Neill had written in 1919 and to suggest the possibility that O'Neill's original poem was written with Boulton in mind. Nonetheless, this is a move that highlights the creative leaps necessary to draw some of the book's conclusions...