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  • The Port Saïd Incident:Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey at Sea
  • William Davies King (bio)

Foreword

What follows is an adventure story, with the shape of a long journey taken to find what was always already at home. It comes out of the life of Eugene O'Neill, an episode of some three and a half months, but it is a romance, not a tragedy, and it has a happy ending demonstrating the power of love. In other ways, too, this story is a departure from what we mostly know of O'Neill, as it ranges boldly to the other side of the world with a largely new cast of characters. Its narrator calls herself Carlotta Monterey, a stage name taken to supersede Hazel Tharsing. In less than a year she would add "O'Neill" to the construction. She was thirty-nine when this story began, just a couple months younger than Gene, and at the far end of a reasonably successful career as an actress and fashion model. She had also gone through three marriages and had just taken the extraordinary step of drawing Gene out of his marriage to Agnes Boulton, a marriage that she felt kept him bound to the past, when drinking, children, and the business of theatrical producing seemed to get in the way of his all-important work as a playwright. Carlotta seemed to open a door to a new existence in which all the noise of the past could be cut out.

Carotta's diary, which covers most of the years of the marriage, is a problematic document for a biographer because it was manipulated by the writer at a late date to correct . . . we don't know what. She initially presented [End Page 233] sixteen volumes of her diary (1928-1943) to the Beinecke Library in 1951, two years before Gene's death, in order to provide researchers with information pertaining to the years in which Gene was still writing. A year later she asked for their return so she could transcribe them in "eternal" black ink on good paper to form a permanent record. Donald Gallup, who was curator of the American Literature Collection, recognized at once that the transcribed volumes had been altered, but there was nothing he felt he could do to recover the original documents without the risk of irritating Carlotta, who was instrumental in conveying to the Beinecke the large collection of O'Neill material, the full extent of which he did not know.1

Thus, the historical record bears this amount of distortion, and many have presumed that the recast diary serves to repair her image for posterity. That may well be, but it does not change the fact that her diary told a story of the marriage in its original form, and it continues to tell a story in its revised form. Unlike Agnes Boulton, Carlotta was not a writer. She typed Gene's manuscripts, drafted his letters, and carried on an extensive correspondence of her own, but her letters show no skill with language except in the art of emphasis. With the use of underlining, capital letters, and exclamation points, she conveyed the vehemence of her feelings and the urgency of her efforts to turn others to her will. Her efforts were always, at least ostensibly, on behalf of Gene, whom she revered, but the power of her personality became feared by many. The story that follows, which I am calling "The Port Saïd Incident," reveals her in a moment of unusual vulnerability, literally at sea, but on the voyage she discovers her independence and strength, enough so that she can also discover her capacity to love. It is told in the form of unabridged diary entries between October 5, 1928, and January 15, 1929. If we extend our imagination into the way a story unfolds diurnally, we find in it a powerful piece of narration.

After their departure for Europe, which took place a few days after the opening of Strange Interlude in early February 1928, Gene and Carlotta stopped for a week in London and a few days in Paris before setting out for southern France "to find a...

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