Et in Arcadia E.G.O.

First to play the part of Eugene O’Neill was not Jack Nicholson in Reds but someone—a no-one—named Eugene G. O’Neill. This stammering poet had learned enough of the theater from his actor father to understand that a role must be realized from outside in and inside out. Looking something like the figure in this photograph, he crafted an image of himself as artist, not “nothing,” in his 1914 letter to George Pierce Baker in which he inquired about admission to Harvard as a “special student.” He signed this fiction-filled letter of self-recommendation “Eugene G. O’Neill.” That middle G remained in his name as late as Exorcism (1919-1920)—and later—because of the initials E.G.O. Aware that self-possession was a mode of authority he wished to extend to authorship, he embraced the pun on the title of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own (1844), which the anarchist bookseller Benjamin Tucker had put in his hands perhaps around 1907, and no later than 1909. “Ego” was Steven T. Byington’s translation of Stirner’s Einzige (better translated as “the individual”), which is not to be confused with the psychological egoism of Freud’s Ich. In both cases, the translator’s choice of the Latin ego (“I”) was meant to give both formality and strangeness to an immediately accessible phenomenon of being oneself, though in a way exceptional. Ego is, as it is said, a term of art, and for O’Neill that phrase gathers new resonance. O’Neill, who learned Latin in his Catholic schools, could not fail to encounter his own initials again and again in the modern theorizing of the self at just the time he was facing the challenge of constructing himself as bearer of the romantic lamp into a new, modern darkness.

At the time this photograph was taken, O’Neill might have been in the middle of reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as it was being serialized in The Egoist, a journal of landmark importance to which the Stirnerite Tucker was a contributor and moving force, as the title suggests. Joyce’s depiction of the Irish Catholic schoolboy Stephen Dedalus coming into his self-awareness, despite the best efforts of his family, his country, and the Catholic Church, created a strong enough impression on O’Neill to lead him to give the name Stephen to his autobiographical character in The Straw. By 1914–1915, the young E.G.O. longed to portray himself as an artist, and Tucker’s egoism found a ready acolyte in O’Neill if only he could find “his own.” His letters to Beatrice Ashe, whom he insistently referred to as “My Own” or “Own Little Wife,” aim above all to seduce, but they are also full

Fig. 1.

Eugene O’Neill early in 1915 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph by Daniel Hiebert. (Louis Sheaffer-Eugene O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College).

of the birth agonies of an artist coming into his own voice. Ownership—or “ownness,” to use Byington’s translation of Stirner’s Eigenheit—possessed his vocabulary at this moment of rebirth of himself as playwright (in a sense, his birth of tragedy). The youthful conceitedness that evinces vernacular “egotism” is through and through his love letters to Ashe, but it is a more profound sort of Eigenheit he aims to cultivate in order to inhabit the role of modern artist.

In mid-December 1914, O’Neill writes of having to devise “a brief autobiography of my life” for the publisher of his new book, to use in promoting it, and he complains, “If I put too much ego in it people are bound to think I am a conceited pup, and if I don’t, why it won’t be interesting.”¹ That autobiographical document is lost, but the photograph above stands in for one who would put out a book of plays with the unlikely title Thirst. In 1914...