“Jimmy Tomorrow” Revisited: New Sources for The Iceman Cometh

James “Jimmy” Findlater Byth (March 19, 1866?–June 6, 1913), O’Neill’s roommate at Jimmy the Priest’s and a former press agent of James O’Neill, shared the O’Neill men’s predilection for drink but little of their ambition. Byth did manage to publish at least one reminiscence, however, titled “Cecil Rhodes,” a yarn that partially recounts his time as a correspondent during South Africa’s Boer War (1899–1902).¹ Byth regaled anyone seated on the next barstool with tales of his adventures as a war correspondent embedded with the Boers. He even makes a tantalizing comparison in “Cecil Rhodes,” for O’Neillians at least, between James O’Neill’s most celebrated role and the unregulated greed of South African diamond smugglers, “all feverish and intoxicated with rapid wealth far beyond the dreams of Monte Cristo.” Now that we have Byth’s reminiscence, supported by press releases from his time working for the Great Boer War Spectacle, the accepted narrative of Byth’s experience in South Africa as apocryphal can be reopened for further debate.

“Cecil Rhodes” has eluded scholars for over a century. But like Poe’s purloined letter, the reminiscence by one of O’Neill’s most significant acquaintances was hidden in plain sight—right in the pages of the storied Pleiades Club Year Book of 1912. It was in this oft-cited volume that O’Neill published his earliest-known literary work, “Free” (penned in 1910 while sailing on the Charles Racine en route to Buenos Aires), and it is now reasonable to assume that “Free” was published at Byth’s behest.² More important, Byth appears not to have been the inveterate liar O’Neill scholars have largely presumed.

James Byth, a muse-like ghost in the O’Neill canon, served as the model for James “Jimmy” Anderson in O’Neill’s 1916 short story “Tomorrow,” the drunken roommate Jimmy in his 1919 play Exorcism, and, most famously, James “Jimmy Tomorrow” Cameron in The Iceman Cometh (a play that’s first title was also “Tomorrow”). Byth’s character in “Tomorrow” lived in a “dream of tomorrows,” while Iceman’s “Foolosopher” Larry Slade (based on O’Neill’s close friend, the philosophical anarchist Terry Carlin) refers to Jimmy as “the leader of our Tomorrow Movement.”³ O’Neill describes Jimmy as having a face “like an old well-bred, gentle bloodhound’s. . . . His eyes are intelligent and there once was a competent ability about him. His speech is educated, with a ghost of a Scotch rhythm in it. His manners are those of a gentleman. There is a quality about him of a prim, Victorian old maid, and at the same time of a likable, affectionate boy who has never grown up.”⁴

Echoes of Byth also reverberate in Ted Nelson, the young playwright in O’Neill’s earliest full-length play Bread and Butter (1914), who remarks, “I’m always going to start that play—tomorrow. . . . They ought to write on my tombstone: The deceased at last met one thing he couldn’t put off till tomorrow,” as well as in the fiction writer Stephen Murray in The Straw.⁵ Although based primarily on O’Neill himself, Stephen characterizes his latent passion for writing serious literature by admitting, “I was always going to—tomorrow—and tomorrow never came. I got in a rut—and stayed put.”⁶

Byth’s origins remain a mystery, but he was most likely born James Findlater Bythe to the upholsterer George Bythe in Church Town, England, a working-class district of Cornwall.⁷ He claimed to have graduated with honors from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, but O’Neill scholars have since discredited this as more Byth chicanery, given that there is no record of this. Other background information on Byth is scarce, and the only bona fide source is Richard M. Little’s feature article about Byth and O’Neill’s father, James O’Neill, entitled “Haunted by the Ghosts of Monte Cristo,” which appeared in the Chicago Record Herald on February 9, 1908. The story lists Byth as...