O'Neill: Son and Artist by Louis Sheaffer (review)

Book Reviews Ie· O'NEILL: SON AND ARTIST, by Louis Sheaffer. Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973. xviii & 750 pp. $15.00. It all began in 1926, when Barrett H. Clark, who had been a great admirer of young Eugene O'Neill ever since the staging of Beyond the Horizon in 1919, published his little 100-page brochure entitled simply Eugene O'Neill. Three years later the slightly revised booklet, having enjoyed a fairly wide free distribution to purchasers of orchestra seats at a revival of Beyond the Horizon, was expanded to about 200 pages under the larger title, Eugene O'Neill, the Man and His Plays. New and revised editions appeared in 1933 and 1936. Foreign editions in London, Buenos Aires, and Athens were so encouraging that Clark produced an almost completely new text of 182 pages in 1947, bringing its subject nearly to the end of his writing career, by which time O'Neill had established himself as America's most important playwright. The situation closely parallels the relationship between England's most important playwright, Bernard Shaw, and his official American biographer, Archibald Henderson - except that Henderson 's three different editions, published between 1911 and 1956, ran to 532, 872, and 969 pages. But between the present and these earliest dates, 1926 and 1911 respectively, the biographical rivalry between these two foremost playwrights of their respective countries had overflowed into a flood of biographical and critical volumes of which it has been almost impossible to keep a record. In this race, however, it must be admitted that the Anglo-Irishman has been the winner by a considerable margin. Quite properly, too, Shaw made his contribution to the thinking and writing of the younger American, as O'Neill's red-iI).k underlinings in his copy of The Quintessence ofIbsenism and his possible use of ideas and even characters from Man and Superman in Strange Interlude show. Louis Sheaffer, however, has far excelled all his rivals in both countries as far as individual production is concerned. His tremendous two-volume biogra489 .490 BOOK REVIEWS phy, O'Neill, with separate subtitles, Son and Playwright and Son andArtis~, runs :to 544 and 750 pages, plus front matter, and thus exceeds Arthur and Barbara Gelb's 970-page (plus 20 pages of front matter) treatment of the same subject, O'Neill, which when it was published in 1962 was expected by most O'NeiIlians to be the definitive work. But the publication of Sheaffer's second volume in 1973 supersedes not only the work of the Gelbs but also the biographies and s1udies of other appreciative students, from Sophus Keith Winther (1934) to 'Travis Bogard (1972). It is therefore no wonder that, as Mr. Sheaffer wrote me in a recent letter, "After all, I've spent sixteen - yes, sixteen years on my O'Neill project, fourteen of these full time." It is hard to believe that anyone in the future could even match -let alone excel- such devotion, such industry, and, on the whole, such comprehensive and enthralling results. Mr. Sheaffer has personally interviewed everyone he could find still alive who had ever had contact of any kind with O'Neill, from his three wives, his doctors, his barber, his chauffeur, his cook, his Japanese houseman, to the patrolman on the beat, and the garbage collector. He has had access to private letters, many previously unused, from O'Neill's relatives , friends, acquaintances, and editors, as well as to diaries of O'Neill himself or of various members of his circles at different times in his life. Sheaffer's list of "Acknowledgments" in his first volume covers ten pages, and of new ones in his second volume eight. It is strange, however, that in his long list of libraries consulted he makes no mention of the C.W. Post College library of Long Island University, which has a considerable number of books from O'Neill's own collection, and which I have described on p. 37 of my article, "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill: P.P.S.," in Modern Drama for June, 1973. Perhaps believing that the difference in emphasis between his two volumes, indicated by his not too felicitous subtitles, would be...